Lesson 114 · 2 min
Scam texts with perfect spelling
AI writes scam messages that are polite, correct and personal, so judge a message by what it asks you to do.
For years people were told to look for spelling errors. A chatbot now produces clean, natural text in Vietnamese, English or any language, for thousands of targets at once.
It can also copy the style of a bank, a delivery company or a tax office, and add your name, your city or the shop you bought from last week.
So move your attention from the words to the request. Does it ask you to click a link, log in, share a code, install an app or pay? Does it give you a short deadline or a threat?
Any message that asks for one of those things gets checked through a channel you choose: the official app, the number on your card, or the counter at a branch.
Do it now
Sort three messages by their request
- 1. Open your text messages and pick three from companies.
- 2. For each, write down only what it asks you to do.
- 3. Mark any that ask for a click, a code, an app or a payment. Those are the ones to check outside the message.
Here is a text I received, with my personal details removed: [PASTE]. Ignore how well it is written. Tell me exactly what it asks me to do, and how I could check that request through an official channel without using anything in the message.
Quick check
Keep going
Next →Set up a family passwordWords from this lesson
- Phishing
- Fake messages that pretend to be someone you trust to trick you into clicking a link, paying or sharing passwords.
- Generative AI
- AI that produces new text, images, audio, video or code, rather than only sorting or scoring existing things.
- LLM
- An AI trained on huge amounts of text to predict the next word, which lets it write, summarise, translate and chat.