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.