I don't know, I've had a couple of bosses who were native English speakers and they would dash off emails so fast obviously without reading them that it took me multiple reads to parse what they might be trying to say. If it were just punctuation or spelling errors I would have been happy.

I suspect they wrote to their bosses much more carefully.

But something as sketchy as this setup would have my antenna twitching anyway, so these kinds of mistakes would probably be red flags given that context, otherwise maybe not

I gotta agree, poor grammar didn't stand out as a red flag to me. I've been through interview loops with like like 80% of the written and verbal correspondence was with people who had English as a second language and they frequently made similar grammatical mistakes. I'm pretty sure two of those companies were legitimately Intel and Amazon.

I'm also surrounded by Asian immigrants in the US and its pretty common to take an English name (sometimes first and last) if your name is so full of non-ASCII characters that American's can't pronounce.

Thanks for good point. I sometimes released, many extroverts (managers/tops nearly all extroverts), are tongue-tied, because they are not thinking before say.

They act like Colt, polling any semi-relevant phrase from scrap-bag of memory, and shooting with it.

I was not in the right state of mind, my brain weirdly skimmed and auto-corrected grammar mistakes. I thought it was weird but I was just happy and yet busy to think about it further.

Yeah I mean when someone is happy and excited that they're going to get a job that pays $45 an hour then they probably won't care whether the employers know English or not.

Is English your first language? I ask because in your first point you write:

> Not too well antiquated with the job hiring process

“Antiquated” means archaic or old-fashioned. There may be other errors in your article; I didn’t read the rest.

s/antiquated/acquainted/ - probably just a spelling error that was autocorrected to the wrong word.

It sounded right when I read it aloud and I'm still recovering from the flu. English is my first language but I still make clumsy mistakes with it.

I recently reread some messages I wrote while and after I had Covid. I made mistakes like this too.

This is also a "red flag" that will probably stop being useful soon, as chatgpt etc make it easy for scammers to write things that don't have this kind of mistake.

I have read that the poor spelling in scams is on purpose, it filters people out early on. Anyone who overlooks the poor spelling and grammar is more likely to continue

Just fyi, anyone can send email (a.k.a. spoofing) from @autonation.com, the harder part is correspondence from that domain - but I think you were pretty much aware of the scam at that point. Good job.

No "Marc Cannon" would begin any sentence with "Kindly" either.

There are definite flavours of Indian English here, which would be far less suspicious - if the scammer's name wasn't non-Indian. I suspect that, firstly, the scammer is not aware that their use of English flags them thus to native speakers, and secondly that they would in any case be subconsciously reluctant to use an Indian name anyway, perhaps because they (paradoxically) think it'd make it seem more like a scam rather than less.

I was waiting the whole time for a request to buy some Google Play gift cards at the nearest store.

"Look, i'm giving you the gift cards on google, that's what you wanted!"

A fake name, a fake job offer, a fake office, and a fake kit. If I was being interviewed I probably would have trolled this guy back by giving him fake money.

> Real professionals do not make spelling and grammar errors

I've worked with lots of professionals, including founders and c-suite people, who appear barely literate in emails and online chat. They're often very good talkers and very bad writers.

That's true but in that specific examples, all the errors and turn of phrase are typical of English speakers in India so it's a dead giveaway.

Definitely a cause for alarm for someone that supposedly works in software in Florida, but there are professionals who don't have English as their first language.

Well, yeah there are professionals who don't have English as their first language, but I mean making a mistake in the most basic punctuation marks?

Sure if he doesn't know the difference between "it's" and "its" then it's fine, but if he doesn't know how to properly use commas in a sentence then one must question his professionality. Additionally, there was no way he couldn't have had access to automation.com

I find it fairly common for people that do not have US English as their first language to not use punctuation the way that I was taught in school. I do that too when I think the punctuation is wrong for what I'm conveying (especially . or , inside quotes, when quotes are a command). Non-native people commonly use quotation marks that I don't know how to produce with my keyboard, put $ after the number, etc. A space before a question mark is not unheard of.

The somewhat read flag is "kindly" (likely Indian?) with "Marc" (likely not Indian) but it's common for people with a name that's difficult for Americans to understand/spell to use an Americanized name.

Using an email address that doesn't match up with the company's well known domain name is a real problem. Suggesting payroll comes by something other than check or direct deposit is a red flag. Luckily, requesting money via wire transfer tipped this person off before things got real bad.

> The somewhat read flag is "kindly" (likely Indian?) with "Marc" (likely not Indian) but it's common for people with a name that's difficult for Americans to understand/spell to use an Americanized name.

This is usually a Chinese thing, though. Indian people tend to just use their own names. Even then, a Chinese person would incorporate some of their name e.g. Mark Li.

I’m not blaming OP here, of course. As he said, he was tired and it takes real bravery to put your hand up and say “I was nearly scammed!”

Space before a ? is the correct punctuation in French, for example.

I don't see how professionalism is tied to English proficiency. I've spent my whole career with ESL people (me included) and it doesn't really make sense to me.

I'm a non native, difference of "it's" and "its" is easy. Commas (and other characters like ; : ) are far more difficult.

As a non native speaker, I find it wild you think it's vs its is harder than punctuation. If somebody can't tell its from it's then they don't know what a verb is, which seems like a much more basic concept than punctuation to me.

It’s super common, native speakers learned verbally then later learned written English and the parts of language.

Exactly, in my experience, it's actually an error made by native speakers but not by ESL speakers. So its vs it's would actually not be a red flag.

Well, yeah there are professionals who don't have English as their first language, but I mean making a mistake in the most basic punctuation marks?

Sure if he doesn't know the difference between "it's" and "its" then it's fine, but if he doesn't know how to properly use commas in a sentence then one must question his professionality. Additionally, there was no way he doesn't have the office email ID.

But what difference does it make? If I were a scammer I would:

- buy a domain for 20 USD/year and create the corresponding [email protected]

- do what the scammer did in the blog post but without grammatical errors (I could even use chatgpt for that) and alway using my custom email address

See. That's easy to fake. If people are willing to pay the scammers, then the grammar errors and proton emails do not matter

Because the real domain is already taken by the real company.

I almost hate to say this to not give scammers any ideas, but it seems pretty obvious to me that you can buy look-alike domains that most people wouldn't think too much about. For example, autonationusa.com, autonationcorp.com, autonation-corp.com, autonation-hq.com, internal-autonation.com hr-autonation.com, autonationrecruiting.com, autonation-hiring.com and so on, you get the idea.

There are even other TLDs you could play with that most non-tech people would think are legit. For example auto-nation.co or autonation.inc autonation.corporation. All of these would cost less than $20. I haven't checked these all for availability, but I suspect at least half the ones on this list are available, and even if they aren't you can play with different combinations to get something that is available. The purpose is only to fool people at first glance.

While most people on HN might know that internal-autonation.com does not actually mean its from autonation, I suspect it would still fool a lot of HN readers. Outside of tech workers, I think this technique would fool the vast majority of the population.

You could even buy a domain for something like new-fake-hrm-saas.com and make a fake website for a fake SaaS HRM/Recruiting tool. Then send all emails from that domain. If anyone asks, you can say that intial emails go through that SaaS tool until you have fully onboarded. This is something legit that actually happens in real life early on in the hiring process when they want all hiring correspondance to go through an HRM tool. Again, maybe a tech worker would be cautious of this technique, but most people would be none the wiser. This would allow you to maintain one domain for multiple scams so you could easily burn one if you get exposed. You could even do subdomains with it like autonation.fakehrm.com and salesforce.fakehrm.com and so on for each company you impersonate.

Again, this isn't to give people ideas. But this could be easily done for $20 a year and minimal effort. (The fake hrm saas site could be a template site, all real SaaS sites look the same anyway).

Would work fine as lots of corporations genuinely do use multiple domains for email. But for scammers, every time someone realises they've been scammed their domain gets taken down and they lose email contact with a whole bunch of other victims in their pipeline at the same time...

One look-alike letter in the domain is all you need.

I guess, but autonatlon.com kind of sticks out.

internal-autonation.com is available right now for $10. autonation.inc is also available. I could generate 100 more like this that would fool most of the American population. Tech workers might be smart enough to avoid them, but the average person wouldn't think twice about these.

For example imagine getting an email from [email protected]. Again, I know a tech worker who actually is likely to have purchased a domain might know what is happening here, but most Americans would think this is legit.

I've received completely legit emails from Chase Bank that used URLs that, on first glance, had to be fake. I followed up using alternate channels and found out that it wasn't a scam just poorly executed "security".

Chase is indeed horrible about this kind of thing. Most of their messages look like spam or scams.

I guess I'm pretty desensitized from having had so many colleagues with atrocious professional writing skills; 'cause the writing itself didn't really raise any red flags for me until "Marc Cannon" instantly blew up at the notion of a check needing to clear before money from it could be spent.

"Good morning, How are you doing today ?"

Except for the unnecessarily uppercased H and the extraneous space before the question mark, this is a perfectly fine English sentence, no?

This is intentional. It's a filter for people who aren't thinking clearly (degraded mental capacity, uneducated, etc) and are more vulnerable.

This reasoning has been used so many times and while it makes sense on the surface, if you think about it for a little longer, then you'd realize it's probably not true. For example, in this case, the bad grammar persisted even in the final stage where the money was about to be transferred. I don't think you really need to "filter" more people at that point.

I'm guessing there was a study of some kind and not just theoretical debate? In a way I would agree with you, but I can also see an argument for the contrary. As in you don't want to change the pattern at this point as that might fire some alarms and spook the horses.

Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They are From Nigeria? (Cormac Herley, 2012)

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-...

I read somewhere that some scammers do this deliberately to filter for easier targets.

Scammers intentionally make grammatical mistakes. If you can spot the mistakes, they don't want to engage with you.

(Of course, there are other reasons why would one spot yet ignore grammatical mistakes - sometimes it is because of the personal situation they are in, sometimes it's of empathy towards non-native English speakers)

Most scammers aren't that smart. The grammatical mistakes just happen to work well for them as a filter.

I’ve heard this a lot, but is it actually true?

Unlikely. I believe it started as a hypothesis to explain the many spelling errors in scam mails, but I don't think this have ever been confirmed to be intentional.

Hanlons Razor is probably appropriate here.

Why are you shaming the victim? Of course some people will fall through the cracks. It's not their fault