Why Are Spam Emails So Obviously Spam?

[IRstuff]

Most of the spam that I get are obviously spam, because the formatting and style are so overtly different than legitimate emails from legitimate companies, which I'm thankful for, but why is that?

Some spam is so badly formatted that the subject line doesn't even come close to correlating with the content; are the spammers just too lazy? A modicum of due diligence would make it so much more challenging to figure out whether it's spam. I've seen a couple of videos on Youtube where you'd have to deep dive into the guts of the message to figure our that the email address was spoofed, but that's less than 5% of the emails I get. The rest are from xyz32432423ou@gmail.com, or similar, so out it goes, or the subject line is obviously bogus, like ### You Won !! ###.

Just curious.

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[stevenal]

Cast a wide enough net and you're bound to catch something.

 

[btrueblood]

Think about the spammer's strategy: he/she wants to find somebody gullible, who can be easily and quickly taken for a small amount of money, so that they can move along to the next target. Why not large amounts of money? Because that gets a lot more attention from authorities. An "ideal" mark will ignore sender's addresses, funny formatting, etc. to get to the "treat" - clicking the link to get the free iphone, or whatever, paying a small "handling fee" to get it shipped, and ignoring everything else: this person can be easily duped. Much more so than somebody like me or you who will delete swaths of incoming emails with a couple of clicks just because the sender is not somebody we recognize: we are harder to "manage" by the scammer and will keep asking too many questions, wasting their time.

 

[dik]

Due to AI, with time, this will improve.

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[electricpete]

I agree it's surprising there is not more proofreading, and will undoubtedly get better with chatGPT both in terms of formatting and in terms of subtler factors of tone that reflect a well-crafted phishing attempt.

As far as email address, spammers probably go through many email addresses, continually jumping to the next when one gets blocked. It's tough to craft a lot of convincing email addresses that aren't already taken. So they don't spend a lot of time on that piece, they just jump to the next randomly generated email to keep the pipeline going.

I've heard there are certain words and patterns that are a warning flag for spam filters. Like for example "loan", "viagra", "immediate" push the suspicion level up a notch. So there may be deliberate misspellings of those types of words in an attempt to evade the spam filters. It may give appearance of sloppy spelling/grammar, but may be cleverer than it looks.