Thursday, April 10, 2008
Paying attention
Filed my income tax by mail yesterday. Got this Nigerian scam email this morning:
Here's my first thought: If I were an English teacher, I'd milk the hell out of these scams. I'd assign my students to gather scams for a month or so, and then we'd spend another month looking carefully at the sentence structure. The best way to learn what's right is by examining what's wrong, and these scams from various countries exhibit every possible grammatical error, some of them fairly subtle.
The point would be: Paying attention to grammar is not just for tea parties. When you've formed the habit of examining language carefully, you can preserve your money from fraudsters.
My second thought: Nope, couldn't happen in a public school today. One word: "Nigerian". Even though many of these "Nigerian" scams are actually written by Australians, a teacher who dared to imply that anything improper was indirectly associated with anything that has an African name would be gone in an instant. ¶ 10:08 AM
Please view the message from the attachment file.
We have sent you the form as an attachment file to prevent fraudulent activity
and further information theft.
Note: We recommend to open the attachment file with browser "Mozilla Firefox"
for a securely transaction.
Best Regards,
Phillip McCrevis
Taxpayer Advocate
Here's my first thought: If I were an English teacher, I'd milk the hell out of these scams. I'd assign my students to gather scams for a month or so, and then we'd spend another month looking carefully at the sentence structure. The best way to learn what's right is by examining what's wrong, and these scams from various countries exhibit every possible grammatical error, some of them fairly subtle.
The point would be: Paying attention to grammar is not just for tea parties. When you've formed the habit of examining language carefully, you can preserve your money from fraudsters.
My second thought: Nope, couldn't happen in a public school today. One word: "Nigerian". Even though many of these "Nigerian" scams are actually written by Australians, a teacher who dared to imply that anything improper was indirectly associated with anything that has an African name would be gone in an instant. ¶ 10:08 AM
