For those who use Facebook - you may have seen a video advert recently using Jacinda Ardern as a way to promote a cryptocurrency. Obviously this is fake - Jacinda does not want you to "invest" your money in any crypto currency, and it’s very likely that there’s not even a real crypto currency or crypto company - just a website that will get you to transfer your hard earned money to scammers. Even if there was a real cryptocurrency involved, you would likely lose most or all of the money you risked. I saw people talking about this scam on Facebook, but I have enough layers of ad blocking at home that it proved too hard to get Facebook to show me any adverts at all, so I don’t have a copy of the video.

It’s not even the first time Jacinda’s been used in this way. Back in 2018 (opens new window) Facebook carried adverts saying that Jacinda had decided to invest half of the country’s reserves in a Bitcoin company. The advert’s link took unsuspecting users to a fake CNN website that had a made up news article about the Treasury buying a bitcoin startup, presumably with the intent of getting people to "invest" in buying shares in the company. Again, any transferred money would likely never be seen again.

And in 2020 (opens new window), the same thing happened again but with a fake One News article. This one claimed that Jacinda told Jesse Mulligan on The Project:

"It's the single biggest opportunity I've seen in my entire lifetime to build a small fortune fast. I urge everyone to check this out before the banks shut it down."

And this doesn’t just happen with Jacinda. Facebook ads use the names of celebrities who are known for taking risks that pay off, making bold but sensible decisions, or just being outspoken and having a lot of money, such as Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Kanye West, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. This scam went even further last year when many celebrities had their Twitter accounts hacked (opens new window), and messages were sent out from their accounts telling people to send a few hundred dollars in Bitcoin to an account and they would receive more money in return. Of course, everyone who did this (totalling a few million dollars) never saw their money again.

Here’s the beginning of one scam video capitalising on Elon Musk’s recent investment in Dogecoin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50v9Wj291B4 (opens new window)

Note the computer generated voice and a promise of a reward of thousands of crypto coins. If this was Bitcoin, that would be worth millions, but the Shiba Inu coin is currently trading at $0.00005, or point zero zero five US cents per coin. (That being said, its current price is up 10 million percent from last year!)

In the case of Elon Musk the water is muddied, because he really has dabbled in cryptocurrencies in the past, and each time he’s tweeted about his investments the worth of the currency - both Bitcoin and Dogecoin - has shot up. So now people scour his tweets, looking for clues as to which cryptocurrency he might be investing in next.

One consistent aspect of these scams is the bad spelling and grammar that they use. It makes sense that scammers in the kinds of overseas countries that are well known for these kinds of scams, such as Nigeria, Russia, India and China, might not have very good English.

However there’s another potential reason (opens new window) for this bad grammar that’s been floating around the internet recently - that the typos are deliberate. There’s an idea that scammers are only looking for responses to their phishing from those that are the most gullible. If they were able to trick a lot of people into engaging with a scam, but ended up with many of them backing out before transferring money, it would end up wasting a lot of the scammer’s time. So supposedly bad spelling would scare away the more intelligent potential victims, only leaving those ripe for the picking to respond.

I’m not sure if I really believe this hypothesis, as I’ve seen no evidence that this is the case. There’s an assumption here that those who fail to notice bad spelling/grammar are more likely to fall for a scam. I think there’s an unsaid third trait here - stupidity. The hypothesis seems to hang on the ideas that people who can’t write well are stupid, and those who fall for scams are stupid, and that this makes the two groups synonymous.

Although there’s likely some crossover between IQ and writing ability, it’s definitely not a strong correlation. I’m a bit of a grammar nazi, and I see some very clever people writing some pretty bad English at times! And I think the correlation between IQ and likelihood of being scammed is likely to be even weaker. As a good example, it seems from some of the profiles I’ve read of people who have been scammed by Nigerian 419 scammers that this classic scam (involving the promise of a windfall of millions of dollars from a prince, if only you can help out with a couple of cash payments to help clear the money) has fooled a cross section of the community - from those unemployed and desperate for cash through to tenured professors.

So, whether you receive a email promising millions of dollars or see a video on social media talking about the next big thing in crypto, the rule of thumb is that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. These days most of us have someone in our family or social circle who’s tech savvy and can check out these kinds of tempting offers. If you’re unsure, and find yourself tempted to make a quick buck through "investing", maybe ask your tech literate friend what they think first.