One safeguard is, of course, having Writer Beware as a resource. The second is the nature of our business, writing.

Simply put, the English is bad-and this is true whatever side of the pond you reside. Although in this particular case, having a good background in British English and culture does give an advantage. (Like that fact that that a Professor in a British university is using American English spelling.)

So with this and other scams there are certain bad English ‘tells’ that enable particularly a writer to see it’s a fake.

e.g missing plurals: guests. Or strange onstructions “These overwhelming gathering”

But the biggest ‘tell’ of all is the way it ends…Stay blessed, indeed. This spam has the some of the same phraseology as the infamous Nigerian bank scams, and I suspect a similar source.

So, all the hours of pouring over prose and rigorous self-critique has now another valuable use: Spam Detection. As Hemingway said “every good writer has an automatic in-built crap detector.”

C. John Arthur