But here’s a question: if we’ve learned to identify these guys by their shibboleths, then why haven’t they learned to identify the people who are just toying with them by their shibboleths?
Here’s my theory: when the scammers realize they’re being toyed with, they pass the correspondence along to an apprentice. The apprentice is supposed to follow up in the appropriate manner, and gets graded on things like language, spelling, coherence, style and the pertinence of his responses. If, contrary to all expectation, the apprentice actually manages to get money out of someone, he gets to keep half.
My pet theory is a bit similar - that there is an organisation of scammers consisting of a large number of spam operators who may not be particularly literate in English and other languages foreign to them, and that these guys are copy/pasting form letters composed by a smaller number of multilingual bosses - the operators know enough to be able to deal with simple questions and answers, but absurdity is lost to them. I assume that the job escalates up the chain of command once the mark appears to be actually hooked.
And having received no response, but wait! I got an email back today saying:
How about that then? Amazing that the deceased person’s surname is Cavendish! - so similar to my pseudo-surname (Cavendish-Cavendish Smythe-Scott-Bentinck).
I’m thinking I might write back and say “Oh my GOD! you’re telling me that uncle Richard is DEAD?! When did this happen?”