Is this email legitimate?
The ACBN's Consumer Affairs Division investigates
The other day, I received an intriguing email—one that, for reasons unclear to me, GMail decided to filter to my “junk” folder.
Wow. Can you believe it?
I mean, what an honor!
The First Lady of the United States was emailing me personally, and offering me a tremendous financial windfall—with home delivery, no less! My ship had come in, and I could finally repay the numerous bookies, arms dealers and hired goons to whom I am in debt. I was elated.
But then, a pang of doubt clouded my joyous day.
What if this email isn’t from Jill Biden?
I decided to break it down.
POINT: This is an incredibly obvious scam, and a poorly-executed one at that.
It’s from a Japanese email address, and written in broken English. It is promising a huge amount of money for no clear reason, and soliciting my personal information in the clumsiest of manners. Only the truly desperate and absolutely foolish would fall for something as hackneyed as this.
COUNTERPOINT: I would like 50 million dollars.
I would buy a boat and fill it with fireworks.
POINT: Jill Biden would not speak like this.
She holds a Doctorate in Education from the University of Delaware, taught English for many years, and has spoken in public for decades. She would most likely not start a correspondence with “hello my dear you urgent message is very needed right now”.
COUNTERPOINT: Maybe she was doing speech-to-text?
She could’ve been driving to the bank and dictating her message to her phone, because that’s more responsible than trying to type while you’re driving, even if it does sometimes garble your message. She seems like the responsible type, and when you’ve got 50 million dollars in the car, you have to be extra cautious.
Besides, I’m not especially coherent when I get excited.
I’m pretty sure I’ve texted my wife that almost verbatim when I was at the grocery store and realized brisket was on sale for $1.99/pound.
POINT: An ATM card is not the best method for delivering fifty million dollars.
If the First Lady of the United States were planning to send me fifty million dollars, there would be far better ways to get it to me. An electronic transfer. A bunch of gold bricks. A suitcase full of those bearer bonds like in Die Hard.
Am I really supposed to believe that she just loaded up a pre-paid debit card that she got at Target like she’s grabbing a last-minute present on the way to a graduation party?
Also, most ATMs have a daily limit of like $1,000 in withdrawals. It would take me 136 years to withdraw all $50 million at that rate.
COUNTERPOINT: She’s doing that on purpose to keep me from spending it all at once.
She knows that if I got the fifty million all at once, I’d fill a boat with fireworks. I’m already on the record as saying that. What am I even going to do with a boat full of fireworks? Crash it into a dock, diving out at the last moment before it explodes?
She’s too prudent to allow that sort of thing to happen.
At $1,000 a day, she knows that I’ll stimulate the economy by buying goods and services, but America’s boat docks and/or beachfront bars will remain unexploded.
POINT: “KINDLY RESPONDED BACK TO ME BECAUSE IS VERY URGENT NOW”
C’mon, dude.
COUNTERPOINT: It would be urgent, though.
Would you want to walk around with a $50 million ATM card in your pocket? I wouldn’t. I’d constantly be checking my pocket to make sure I hadn’t dropped it at Arby’s or the fireworks store or whatever.
I proposed to my wife roughly six hours after her engagement ring came in at the jeweler because I was so scared I’d lose it. I may have even said “HERE YOU KEEP TRACK OF THIS” while I was still down on one knee.
I can’t blame Dr. Jill for thinking is very urgent now.
POINT: This is an email from a stranger soliciting your personal information.
Whoever this is, they’re asking for my home address—and for some reason “(my) airport”?—which is surely the first step in a gradual loosening of information that will soon require me to give my Social Security number and bank routing information.
COUNTERPOINT: The First Lady values my knowledge as a frequent flier.
She knows that I fly often for both work and leisure, and perhaps even knows that I get Group 2 boarding on American Airlines. She has never flown through Louisville’s Muhammad Ali International Airport, and wants to know if it’s the best way to fly into town to deliver the ATM card to my residential address.
My answer is: yes, it’s fine, as long as you don’t check a bag.
(The baggage service at SDF is really slow, especially if you get in late.)
Besides, you shouldn’t put a $50M ATM card in a checked bag.
POINT: This message directs me to contact with email at “mrsjillbiden26@gmail.com.”
That is not the email that this message came from, which is another clear sign that it’s a scam.
Furthermore—as previously mentioned—Jill Biden has a doctoral degree, and commonly goes by “Dr.”, not “Mrs.”.
Finally, wouldn’t FLOTUS have had the foresight to have secured jill.biden@gmail.com, and not have to append a number to the end?
Why would it be mrsjillbiden26?
COUNTERPOINT: Jill Biden is from the Philadelphia area.
She might just be a big Chase Utley fan.
POINT: This is not Jill Biden, for crying out loud.
It is an email scam, of course, and despite the laughably flimsy pretense and flawed syntax underpinning it, it might work on someone? I mean, sure, 99.99% of people are sure to recognize this as what it is, but at that rate, you only need to send 10,000 emails to get a hit. Whatever financial-scam farm this is coming from is probably sending millions of these emails every day. There has to be some kind of financial incentive to flood the internet with this kind of garbage—the equivalent of dragging an industrial fishing net across the ocean.
I can have a laugh at this, but it’s sad to think that there are people out there desperate enough to believe that the First Lady of the United States would contact them via a nongovermental email address with an eight-figure cash offer for no reason.
COUNTERPOINT: I already responded.
—Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)
For a minute I thought this was a scam because it came on a tuesday.
At a previous job, a bowl of swedish fish (or, perhaps, phish, in this context) would be put out in the kitchen each Friday that we went a whole week without anyone falling for the test phishing emails IT would send out... It took me a few months to realize the bowl only went out on weeks our semi-retired founder/president emeritus was on vacation.