There are some very clever scammers out there; it’s not always easy to pick them, especially when they are hidden behind a legitimate business enterprise. eBay scams spring to mind where official eBay emails are copied and then embedded with links to sites intended to defraud the reader. An obvious sign of a scam is poor spelling and grammar because the perpetrators are often based overseas. Sometimes further research is necessary.
Recently I received a fax from a company called ‘Upskilled’ about government funded rebates for training courses. Everything looked quite legitimate but a few things raised flags with me. For starters, the email wasn’t addressed to anyone. It was titled, ‘Attention: All Managers- Administration, Operations, HR, Sales, Project’. That’s a fairly big scope! As I operate a virtual office, I wasn’t sure if the email was intended for me or one of my clients. Further reading showed that the three page document had several punctuation errors and typos such as missing periods at the end of sentences, spaces in the middle of words and a fairly obvious tautology in “…a maximum of $3890, yet however, upon course completion…”
A tautology is saying the same thing twice using different words. Yet and however both have the same meaning. Yet means “inspite of that/all the same/nevertheless”, however usually means “but” but can also mean “nevertheless/all the same”.
Curious, I looked up the website which contained similar errors of which just a few examples are:
“Upskilleds’ program are delivered by Upskilled’s expert trainers” – apostrophe in two different places in the same sentence. ‘Program’ is singular, ‘are’ is plural.
“There are guidelines that govern the eligibly for funding…” Eligibly is not a word.
I did a further search on one of the trainers who appears to be involved in three seperate companies at the same time. Another search highlighted the whole thing as a scam. I remain unconvinced either way. For that reason, and the fact that I wouldn’t want to send my employees on a course run by a company that can’t communicate effectively, the fax ended up in the bin.