Phishermen have no shame...

[seawasp]

... Got a spam/Phish message purporting to be from the CDC and asking me to create a "personal vaccination profile" for use in controlling H1N1 spread.

I really wonder how anyone can fall for these things; it's asking for stuff that the Constitution would forbid the government from doing, and all you have to do is mouseover the link to see that it's not going to the CDC, but to some server in another country.

Comments

[kengr]

It works because some people only ever read tiny bits of what they look at. In this case "last chance" and $x.

So they automatically "fill in" what they'd expect to be around such, and act accordingly.

Think back to school or other places where everyone *had* to read sections of text aloud. How many folks were rather obviously only seeing keywords and "filling in" the rest according to what they *expected* it to say, and then stumbling when the next bit they actually *looked* at didn't match what they expected?

[seawasp]

Hm. When I heard people asked to read things aloud, the problem wasn't that they'd have problems from filling in; it was that they read like robots, exactly what was on the page. They didn't think about it. They didn't invest any actual emotion or understanding into it. They might as well have been my old ATARI with the word-pronouncing program.

[muirecan.livejournal.com]

This sounds like the test a store was talking into trying. They ran a hard times sale. Everything marked up 25%. According to the story very few people caught or commented on the fact that prices where marked up.

[kengr]

My experience is that while a lot of folks do the read it like a robot" bit, a lot do anything *but* read what is on the page. At the very least, you get folks changing the phrasing to the way they'd say it. But you also get folks who "re-interpret" it even more than that.

It's something that always puzzled me, as early as third grade (back in the early 60s). I'd wonder how they could *possibly* be reading "that" when it wasn't what was on the page.

And as I recall, there are studies that show that people, especially if they are "skimming" *don't* actually read the page. They look for key words and phrases. And mostly ignore the surrounding text.

[kayshapero]

Certainly the ones doing customer support tend to do that - it can be tricky avoiding inclusion of key words that send them blithely off in the wrong direction... Sometimes I think I'm talking to the old Eliza psychiatrist program...