one born every minute

[extemporanea]

Spam is the new coat lint: the irritating kipple clinging to your garments, that you spot, classify and brush away without thinking about it. It's become background noise to e-mail, so routine that I don't even think about the analysis I do, reflexively, on each message as it pops into my inbox. It's been months since I've had to do a search to double-check for scam warnings with any of the reputable sites, because mostly I reject them, as most of you probably do, either on the subject line or halfway through the first sentence. This auto-destruct is based primarily on their grammar and expression and only secondarily on their actual content and positioning. The scams may change, but the level of illiteracy remains somewhere around your ankles, in the mud.

I haven't yet had to endure spam on my phone, bar the occasionally quickly-deleted marketing screed from some company where I actually have an account of some sort, until this morning, when an SMS message cheerily announced that I'd won something! The re-contextualisation is the sneaky part, with the small but real possiblity that I won't transfer the paranoid skillset from email to the new medium; hell, if Cory Doctorow can be caught out, balloon, cape and goggles notwithstanding, I certainly can. It's the more likely because legitimate cellphone companies actually do run promotions of various sorts; the chance that you'd score money via a text message is small, but it's greater by several magnitudes than the likelihood that you'd win via email.

This one didn't even touch sides: my laser-pointed search-and-destroy grammar-analysis reflex kicked it out with the first word. Different medium, same sad, illiterate phishers.

Congratulations!! Your no. Was among the lucky winners on the NOKIA 2010 YEARLY PROMO. You won, R150,000. Ref no. 0155P. Call +27719451302. For Your Cash Prize.
Fail on the following counts:

1. "Congratulations" as the opening word. This is sheer marketing, designed to trigger wish-fulfilment, and hence to pull you in and make you read from the first word. A genuine win notification letter doesn't need to honeytrap you, it'll probably congratulate you but there's likely to be a lot more legalese involved and a far less frantically effusive tone.
   
2. Multiple exclamation points. Sure sign, as Terry Pratchett sagely observes, of a diseased mind, quite apart from the informal register.
   
3. "Number" abbreviated as "no." If this were a legitimate promotion win notification - well, it probably wouldn't be by SMS, but if it were it would be by bulk SMS from a computer, not typed on a phone with predictive text, and if it were from Nokia they wouldn't be worried about length and cost. Also, a formal notification would require a more formal register and legalese. This is a habitual informal phone-user scammer slipping into familiar habits without thinking about how they position the typer.
   
4. Capitalisation of "Was" after the abbreviation full stop. Auto-function on most phone text editors, here simply not corrected. Hurry/lack of concern for grammar do not say "official communication."
   
5. Capitalisation of NOKIA 2010 YEARLY PROMO. Self-important, attempting to be catchy, too Nigerian for words.
   
6. Random, incorrect comma after "won". Sheer illiteracy. Corporal Carrot Commas are only cute in Corporal Carrot.
   
7. The win amount: R150 000 is simply too large to be realistic for any competition via cellphone. Mostly the legit ones seem to be small sums, airtime, etc. Again, this is trying to elicit greed and thus prompt the revelation of personal details and account numbers which is presumably the point of this. The phrase "Cash prize" towards the end of the message has the same purpose - "cash" is a trigger word.
   
8. Minor props on the reference number, it's the only bit that so far sounds halfway authentic, although in a competition of any size it would probably have to be longer and more complex.
   
9. Random full stop in the middle of a sentence, before "For your cash prize." Actually, this says non-native English speaker to me, it's not a classic first-language error.
   
10. The scam is detailed, with much of the above content, on the MTN page, which means it's not only lame, it's old and busted.

Whatever happened to the classic cons and stings of yesteryear? the ones that entailed actually studying your victim, learning the idiom, working to construct a tone and approach that provide a reasonable facsimile of the real thing? The truth, of course, is that I'm not the market for this. The market for this is three fold: (1) people who are not familiar with internet culture and memes and who mistake the text medium for authority; (2) people who are really desperately poor and are grasping at straws; and (c) people who are as illiterate as the scammers.