The only thing sadder is the people who call about Home Warranties - I got one all flustered when I told them my Home already had 73,000,000 miles on it (nine years old) and asked if it would cover the replacement of the foundation at 100,000,000. They put me on hold to talk to their supervisor.
I get the car insurance ones all the time and I ask if they cover my Bugatti and Ferrari and they always get excited and I usually keep em going for a good 10 to 20 minutes before asking if they will also insure my Geo Storm. Then they usually hang up on me.
One thing to note, scam emailers can use bad spelling or weird grammar deliberatly so that they only get responses from people who don't notice those things, as people that oblivious may also not notice a scam is happening.
There are also pedants who reply to those to correct the spelling and grammar, and the spammers are just hoping for a reply where they can start to develop rapport and then get the replying person off of their guard.
When this was less prevalent, I used to respond with nonsense, like "Heeho, can't wait to see you at the polo grounds this weekend! We're going to trounce those buggy blighters this year!" If they responded, I'd then send something equally nonsensical like "Octoberfest this year in Munich, I'm in! Do you know any nice Frauliens who we can go with?". If they responded again, I'd send them something in Klingon. There's only a certain amount of crazy even scammers will accept, and Klingon (or Latin) seems to be the limit of their patience.
reminds me of when someone called me promising they could get ten more people to call me every day, and I finally got fed up enough to tell them, "it costs me $40.00 every time i stop work to answer the phone, and I'm already sending people to my competition because I have more work than I can handle. why would I pay you to make it worse?"
Sounds like you've got a need for an employee. Maybe even one that costs $40/hr if that's what it costs to answer the phone. No idea though, I'm just a guy on the internet... take that as you will.
So true! I think we've turned away at least 1,500 cases this year (or at least that's how many Declination Letters we've sent). Why would I want MORE calls?!
@@kenbrown2808 Mostly true. Your company could get a secretary at $18/hour and they could take some of your busy work. That way more of your $40/hour time can go where it needs to be. Also a secretary can screen your calls and take notes/messages based on what you actually want to know.
thank you for breaking it down!!With everything going on right now, the best decision to be on any creative man's heart is having a profitable investment strategy.
I agree with you and I believe that the secret to financial stability is having the right investment ideas to enable you earn more money, I don't know who agrees with me but either way, I recommend either real estate or crypto and stocks
@Sunnycaroni The fluctuations of the market only affect those that hodl coins, but traders makes money on both sides, when it's bearish they go short when it's bullish they go long... The best strategy to use in trading crypto is to trade with a professional, like Arjun B Jagat he understand the market quite well, that way maximum profits are guaranteed.
@@jackfinnva2409 I'm honestly surprised that this name is being mentioned here, I stumbled upon one of his clients testimony last two months in CNBC world news and decided to try him out...I'm Expecting my third cashout in 2days
I used to work for a company that provided online advertising and SEO management. Sales would send potential customers an email saying that we had analyzed their website and it scored low on various rankings. There was no analysis, they just sent the same email to everyone. Customer service wasn't aware of the fictional analysis, so when customers would call in to see if their scores improved it got awkward
Were you also in a crowded small internet Cafe in Nigeria or some building from the Soviet era in Moscow? I get needing a job but is it really a legitimate job when your work involves scams? Kinda makes people like you part of the problem and sometimes participant in the crimes of ripping people off. Especially when you are aware that the "product" your trying to con people into is bs and the description of the service or product is based on bs aka lies.
@@rockchildofthe60s69 this was a US based company. I didn't stay there once I learned how the sales department worked. So quit being a dick and making judgments about the moral character of "people like me"
This feels like a video that is a great example of Steve's background of being a lawyer, author, and mainly a teacher. Can you imagine turning in a paper this poorly written in college and having to have this talk with Professor Lehto?
Hell, I came to the US from a foreign country and I wrote better than that in elementary school! (Full disclosure: the foreign country was England, so I cheated a bit.)
In the past, emails of this nature were to be automatically flagged as SPAM or even a scam. However today, even legitimate emails are poorly written like the examples you mentioned. Writing proper communique is a lost art.
You're just in the wrong place; if you want people who can write proper communiques you should check out the French. It's a French word, never widely adopted and rarely properly used in English. There's probably a French word for an English speaker who uses words like communique to sound fancy. I would imagine it's less dull sounding than 'prententious knob'.
@James Bael That's not a word to sound fancy. If you grew up in an environment where proper English was spoken, this would be a normal word to you. I heard the complaints of how bad public school education in the US was, but I only realized it when I communicated with everyday Americans. I only learned English in school, which was mostly speaking on the same topics, in the same fashion as I do in my native tongue. I only got blank stares from Americans. I then shut my mouth and let them speak in order to know how to level my speech to theirs. I learned that most Americans don't know much, if any, spelling, grammar, math, or vocabulary beyond 3rd grade level. Somehow administrators think it's a good idea to teach kids that there are a gazillion genders while the kids don't even master their ABCs.
@@sblijheid the constant comment lapses in grammar & spelling annoy me to distraction. Most couldn't write a business letter by hand if their lives depended on it. I know companies hiring people without in-person interviews though, there's a crap shoot!
😂 Brilliant video, Mr. Steve! 💗 We've cracked the "pre-writing" code! Pre-writing is the genius idea that you write on the cocktail napkin as you nurse your fifth Guinness. 🤪 🤭
Ah, the J K Rowlig approach to writing... or, in her case, the coffee I can nurse all day while I sit in the heat of the pub... (with the approval of the barman on duty)... whom, I hope, was suitably rewarded when J K acheived her deserved riches from her writing....
I still keep getting emails from the confidant attorney from the minister of some African country that needs my help to receive a few million dollars and I get a cut.
Madison Avenue should be taking notes. With no intended offense to Steve Lehto, this is a master class in how to engage your customers with a nearly 20-minute commercial that unobtrusively highlights and develops interest for some of your published works while providing an entertaining and informative exploration into a certain type of spam. Cheers to you, Steve! And by the way, we could not find any of your videos on RU-vid and we found this disturbing. We are a video publisher hybrid...
I’m an Indy writer, and I get these emails all the time. Lately, I’ve been getting super pushy messages wanting to promote my YT channel. I rarely ban people, but I had to because after I didn’t respond, they got aggressive.
In my IT job, I frequently have to deal with people in India and fix what they've screwed up. What you're quoting sounds like it was written by a lot of the people I deal with. Note that I'm not saying all IT people in India are trash; they have some great people. However, the culture there leads to people not doing anything they're not explicitly instructed to do by their manager, and even then trying to pass the job to someone else so they don't take the blame if something goes wrong. I love working in a culture where I can massively screw up, learn from the mistakes, fix things, and be praised for teaching the lessons learned instead of being fired for something minor going wrong.
I've noticed a similar work culture in many companies around the world that contract for outsourced work from the US. The American company tires to maximize profits by paying as little as they can for the labor, and the contracting company tries to maximize profit by doing the least amount of work to fulfil the contract.
The second one especially (the marketing email) absolutely sounded like something that might have been written by an Indian. Source: I just spent more than four months in India.
Hi Teams Steves thank you for reading this best emailed invitations from our Published Housing Market Company. It was good to hear you supported our relationship with you. Our Team looks for good businesses with you. Please tell us feedback so we can do better between us.
Actually, it sounds more like she's saying "I can't find your books, which are very alarming". So your books are alarming, but she can't find them. Oh, yes, I found all your books quite easily.
You strike an issue I just noted this past year. With the move of so many, out of a fixed "land line" telephone and moving almost absolutely onto cell phone as primary, we approach a problem of finding phone numbers without a dedicated directory. I live in rural N.C. and have realized I can't even look up my next-door neighbor's phone at this point in time, even having run into her while voting last week. Of course, it's easy enough to walk next door and knock, but the point is all the other neighbors I don't know, or even know if I might want to know them. Clearly this person is not local. I don't know if it was a bot, but it sounds like some exchanges I had when I wrote commentary that went outside the US. There are many "English speaking people" who are similarly handicapped in written English.
The flow of the sentences give away that this person is a non native English speaker and also does not live in an English speaking country. Americans who don't master English, usually make mastakes with words that sound alike, but not spelled the same, punctuation and simple grammar. They tend to write as they speak.
@Jim Naden Me too. I wish I had a zap gun to zap away my neighbors. I'm working on moving to the middle of nowhere to avoid neighbors. I only don't know how to solve the squirrel neighbors.
Well, we've lived in a semi-rural environment for about 24 years. Over the years, I've noticed that more and more folks DON'T have their name on the mailbox. It's considered a "privacy/identity theft" issue. Or it may be that the paste on letters are too expensive and when folks move or replace the mailbox they don't bother with the name.
Yes. And paid well. ----- I get questions like yours every time I run a cyber security class. The reason it is viable boils down to the same logic as any business. ROI. Using cheap labor, sending out these phishing emails at massive scales, getting one hit in several thousand, and then factoring in the exchange rate (these scammers are in other countries). That's enough. Often times a successful implementation of these attacks yield only a couple hundred USD. That's enough for entire businesses, renting large offices all over India (and other places as well), to make rather large profits while employing a considerable number of people. - As far as bots, these emails and replies are not generated by bots. They are simply pre-generated scripts and sometimes auto-replies. The verbiage is odd because the writers are not native-English speakers. The initial emails go out automatically but that isn't the same thing as bots. - Bots are sometimes employed to grab PII for use in Spear-Phishing attacks. These are where they use some of your PII to seem more legitimate (name, address, business name, etc). But, even then, it's still usually a person simply adding the bot-grabbed PII to a script. - Bots can be a problem, but the cheap labor and scale means that it's simply much easier to employ many non-technical people to "hand-jam" out these pre-crafted emails and replies versus creating bots. Since 99% of the work is copy/paste and the only time they really need to spend any meaningful time is when a fish bites. - Also, it's common that they actually aren't trying to get YOUR money. Simply getting access to someone's FB means that they can then send out a massive number of messages on FB Marketplace, from a legit account, to try to scam buyers/sellers. It's more steps but gives them a better return. - There's a whole world of methodology and processes employed. But, the vast majority of the time they are simply relying on volume with low skill attacks. ----- By the way, there's some fantastic RU-vid channels where techs will scam the scammers and it can be pretty hilarious.
I have a book called Eyes of Forgotten Innocence which was published in 2004 with poems, prose, art, and facts about the dangers to at risk children from the Internet (so it is QUITE DATED). I keep getting offers like this to TURN MY BOOK INTO A MOVIE SCRIPT WHICH WILL BE SEEN BY THE TOP PRODUCERS IN HOLLYWOOD!!! Yeah, someone gets paid for this IF someone is naïve enough to believe it (of which there are many). Great video! Thanks!!!
Thanks for the fun and letting me know about your books. Bought the murder houses one just now. I have always been fascinated with true crime in general and cases like Lizzy Borden, etc. in particular.
I must be old. When I heard the word "hybrid," I immediately thought of Italian design with an American drivetrain, e.g. Iso Griffo, AC Cobra, Jensen Interceptor, etc.
I love it when they email you or send you crap in the mail, and they get your name wrong. I get stuff for Paul Bahre Jr. I'm not a Junior, I'm almost a Paul Bahre the 2nd but I'm not because my middle name is from my other grandfather Everett All*.* and my First name came from Paul Bahre but his middle name was Burton. So, I'm not a Jr. or even a 2nd. We also get emails and mailers for my wife addressed to Katherine Bahre but her name is Kathy, only plain Kathy. So, the way I feel about these marketing geniuses is that if they didn't take the time to realize our real names then they get deleted or summarily thrown in the trash.
If you use your real name on social media, this happens. Google and Yahoo filter out the spam easily because my name is unique and a spammer can't guess it. That's why I hate facebook. They put your name out in the open for spammers to grab.
I loved the bit about writing "Can you read?" The irony here is that if the person cannot read, they won't know that you're asking them that unless they have someone else read the question for them! 🤣😵💫
I can see how you find humor in these emails; I personally don't bother with anything that I didn't initiate, NOT emails, unknown callers, unknown texts, and in fact I wish I knew the people initiating these bothersome forms of communications, I would certainly put a stop to them.
A few years back I got an email that had my best friends name on it. At first I thought it was strange because while he does have my email, he NEVER emails me usually just shooting me a text. Then I saw the preview and it started with Hi Kenyatta & I knew for sure that it was spam because nobody except for family uses my first name so I deleted it right away. Then a couple of days later I got an email from one of my cousins who does use my first name but because she would usually just either text me or FB message me I knew to delete it right away. I haven't gotten any like that since but I thought it was strange that the spam filter didn't catch it.
@@alexdrockhound9497 Correct. I got a call from friends who were in another state at the time who informed me they got an email at 3 am about viagra. Said they knew I wouldnt be up sending those emails at 3 am. I deleted my contacts. And yes it was yahoo.
An old friend of mine once got an email from his cousin that he's quite close with. It daid he was stranded in Miami, that he got robbed, and asked if his cousin could send him $2,000. At first he was alarmed, then he thought to himself that if his cousin would go on vacation, he'd tell him. He then called his cousin who answered immediately and assured him that he was not on vacation. It appears that the cousin's email got hacked.
The first e-mail sounded like it may have been a bot: The second initially sounded like someone who was not a native English speaker, but then degenerated into sounding like something typed from a foreign language into Google Translate. BTW I think that you are managing your social media just fine!!
They hang up after "I'd say it's fraudulent, I don't have an account. Or, how do I get an account with the rain forest? They get mad when you ask how long the scam is going to take.
They're going to give authors total control! Writing, editing, cover design, publishing, marketing, the author gets to do all that! All this company asks is you give them money so you can do all the work.
~"A hybrid press or hybrid publisher is a publishing house that operates with a different revenue model than traditional publishing, while keeping the rest of the practices of publishing the same.[1] The revenue source of a traditional publisher is through the sale of books (and other related materials) that they publish, while the revenue of hybrid publishers comes from both book sales and fees charged for the execution of their publishing services."~ wiki
@@wheelsndealz It has everything to do with it. Do you realize, for example, that one way to give someone complete control is to just make them do all the work? I know that's a complicated idea, requires some high-level thinking and extrapolation of which few people are capable. So, I understand that you didn't get that joke the first time around. But I believe if you sat down, and spent a couple hours a day hashing through the concept, you have a shot at grasping it. Good luck!
Let me start with I am a literary convention promoter in the SE Tennessee and NW Georgia area. I have heard about this going around. A Hybrid publisher? Yes, that is a real thing. It is one that does digital (ebooks) and print. But the email? Sheeesh, The last publisher I would want is one that can't send an email with proper grammar and misspellings. First thing they need is an editor for their emails.
Whoever sent that email more likely was just given a list of email addresses or they just been trained to do some generic searches. Call centers like the ones here in the Philippines have clients that hires people to send emails like that.
Hmm. I've pranked telemarketers but haven't done so with email. You've opened up a whole new source of amusement for me. Thank you-my job affords me a lot of free time.
Steve, (and this is not pre-written.) this sounds like my solicitor from Mozambique who's trying to reach me because my dead uncle has left me a lot of money all I need to do is send them some money so he can send me some money. have fun. . .
Hybrid publishing is a publishing model that combines elements of traditional and self-publishing. In most aspects, a hybrid publisher functions just like a traditional publisher, with the important difference that authors subsidize most or all of the cost of publishing and are not given an advance on royalties.
My dad is an author, but if you Google search him and don't put the word author after his name you'll get links to a baseball player from the 1930s with the same name.
I can almost feel my dad rolling over in his grave at the emails from these people. Especially since he was an English teacher. I might not be an English teacher, nor an English major, but I have preteen, nieces and nephews, who could write better than these people.
With scammers, after wasting plenty of their time, I tell them 'I have two very important thing to tell you'. I then wait until they ask what. 'F--- O--'
I had a group faxing me (back in the day), they wouldn’t stop. So I set up my modem to dial, pause for answer, hang up and redial... 35,000 times over a weekend. This is when the connection charge was 25 Cents. They never faxed me again.
I used to have a job where the work description and trade language was equally confusing…I was a RV extended warranty salesman… I didn’t even understand what I sold.
