Toby Dillon, Short fiction, my specialty. Quora, my current publisher.
You know those phishing scams, where you get an email that claims to be from Bank of America or some Nigerian prince, or something similar, offering you money in exchange for your personal bank information? Every time I get one of them, I notice (I assume because I’m a writer and editor) that various words are misspelled and the grammar is typically off somehow.
I always thought that this was because the people writing these scams didn’t understand English.
There’s an article from Business Insider from 2014, though, that opened my eyes to true mass-media genius:
In fact, those typos are a key part of the scam.Levitt and Dubner explain the genius behind such an obvious scam in terms of "false positives," referring to email recipients who engage with the scammers but don't ultimately pay. Reaching out to scores of potential victims isn't much work, thanks to the ease of email, but with each reply from a gullible target, the scammers are required to put forth a little more effort.Therefore, it's in the scammers' best interest to minimize the number of false positives who cost them effort but never send them cash. By sending an initial email that's obvious in its shortcomings, the scammers are isolating the most gullible targets. If you trash their email, that's fine. They don't want you, someone from whom there's virtually no chance of receiving any money. They want people who, faced with a ridiculous email, still don't recognize its illegitimacy.
FoxNews is the Nigerian money scam of news. They don’t want me, an educated, politically-literate and engaged middle-aged father who attends community councils and commission meetings and volunteers to help people, and who reads other sources of news and opinion before forming my own. I’m not the target demographic, because I’m not gullible. In order to hold my attention, they’d have to work harder to present actual news and not bald-faced lies and innuendo.
I would actually trust the National Enquirer over FoxNews, and aside from a single story about a philandering politician from a decade or so ago, nothing I’ve read in those pages has illuminated me on any topic of importance.
Note to advertisers and marketers: if you want to reach me, don’t advertise on FoxNews. If you want my dollars, don’t advertise on FoxNews. I go out of my way to avoid buying products that are advertised on FoxNews as I associate anything having to do with that channel as fraudulent.
