In case you haven’t already seen it, the following email is going around. Gmail was wise enough to put them both in my spam folder. I will quote both so you can see how suspicious they are:
Here is the first one:
from: Engr Ivan Bruce bengrivan@gmail.com
to:
bcc: danieljamesgreene@gmail.com
date: Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 1:50 AM
subject: YOUR SERVICE !!!
Hello,
I’m Engr Ivan,I would like more info about your interpreting service,I will be attending 4days conference in your city on 25th-28th of July to some student(deaf).Kindly let me know your charges per hr and details about your interpreting service(ASL) so that i will book ahead before coming.
You can mail me directly on
IvanBruce@usa.com
Await your reply.
Engr Ivan Bruce
And here is the second one:
from: Dr Russell Park drrussellp@gmail.com
to:
bcc: danieljamesgreene@gmail.com
date: Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 3:53 AM
subject: SERVICE NEEDED !!!
Hello,
I’m Dr Russell,I would like more info about your interpreting service,I will be attending 4days conference in your city on 27th-30th of August to some student(deaf).Kindly let me know your charges per hr and details about your interpreting service(ASL) so that i will book ahead before coming.
You can mail me directly on
Rpark@dr.com
Await your reply.
Dr Russell Park
Notice how impossibly similar they are? Note the subject line in ALL CAPS with three exclamation marks — not signs of professionalism. Note also the grammatical errors like the comma splices, the absence of spaces after commas and before open parentheses, the lack of hyphen and the ungrammatical s in “4days conference,” the lack of period after the abbreviation for hour (“hr”) and the lowercase i. Your English teacher was right; grammatical errors reduce your credibility, and so they should. Finally, note how they each ask you to reply to email addresses other than the address the emails were supposedly sent from. I don’t know what their scam is, but there’s obviously something afoot.
Daniel Greene 