"Nigerian Letters", or How to recognize phishing spam

All of us sometimes receive strange letters in which we are congratulated on winning the lottery or the inheritance that fell from the sky. Once such letters flowed on behalf of the Nigerians, hence the current “Nigerian letters” on the Internet. A more scientific name for such a way to profit is phishing (phishing), that is, “fishing”.

People have somehow learned to recognize more familiar, obsessive spam, but here it’s all in English, people offer serious money. Winnings and legacies play the role of bait. Catch fish, big and small, maybe someone will bite. According to statistics, about 0.2% of recipients take such letters seriously. To reduce this percentage to a logical zero, I tried to formulate the following signs of "bad letters." By the way, such a message should be ruthlessly deleted or marked as spam. So, reading the header or the text of the email, it is worth the guard if:

• the sender is unknown to you (“Yours truly, Dr. Mwanga, Mombasa, Kenya”).
• the company in question is unfamiliar (“Spanish Tobacco sincerely congratulates you!”).
• the country in question is unfamiliar (and most often these are African countries, more rarely Asian and Latin American).
• there is a slight discrepancy between the sender's name and his email address (the letter is supposedly from Toyota, and the e-mail is Chinese).
• The sender's e-mail looks strange (many decent addresses are already taken, so spammers are content with addresses like toyota.uk3 @ 9.cn or molly904@rediffmail.co.uk).
• The e-mail of the sender belongs to an unfamiliar foreign mail server - there are examples in paragraph 5. For example, gmail. com traditionally inspires more confidence than @ 9.cn.
• there are irrelevant punctuation marks in the letters, spaces or large letters (for example, Dear Aleks !!! we CONGR.ATULATE you !!). Thus, spammers try to avoid the formidable email filters that filter out words and phrases characteristic of spam messages.
• the sender asks you to send your personal data - full name, address, phone number, bank details.
• if you have Gmail, in the header of the letter you can see not only from whom the letter came, but also to whom to reply. If these are two different addresses, then you have phishing spam.
• and, finally, if the letter was not sent to your address. Surprisingly, this happens regularly. As the owner of contorra.ru, I receive letters sent to various addresses, from the commonplace buh and sekretar@contorra.ru to more creative snezhana and denisk.

This list does not pretend to be complete - I will be glad if you add your own considerations to it.