I know this comes down to institutional incompetency, but at some point there was a singular human person putting the template content the SMS message in question was generated from into some computer system somewhere and I genuinely wonder what was going on in their head that made them string the words together in this way. You'd have to give it a true, earnest shot to make it worse.
"The words" are probably nested templates so that at the level of input it's hard to really understand what the completed end result looks like. Also, there's many well-intentioned people in tech doing stuff that's just a tiny bit too complex for them to execute by themselves without a buddy or a reviewer. There are also whole teams and departments at big enterprises where someone might not be doing it alone, and they might also not be completely incompetent, making them the star engineer on the team, while everyone else wisely keeps their mouths shut since they surely don't have anything to contribute to the process. All the really good people that worked there, were snatched up by some fancy, greenfield project, on another floor, or got a position on some elite "refactoring team", surely not wasting their time on updating templates.
Everywhere that I know of requires a real, specific, individual to sign off on the purchase order, charge it to their card, send the bill to accounts payables, etc...
Could easily be one person writing the message. Another who demanded partial edits in a Jira ticket. But then the data types didn't match up with what the writer requested and then the dev didn't want to deal with it and just shipped it.
Or it could be that the message is made with a bunch of disjointed and constructed if statements and only the final output is piped to the customer. I have seen some very terrible log messages like that as nobody is looking at the entire message, just the little bit in the conditional they are editing at that point.
As an anecdote, I once worked on code that generated these very detailed error messages about why something went wrong. I discovered most never made it to the customer as someone later down the line reassigned a variable rather than +=. Piles of support tickets could have been avoided.
Some say scammers are very smart, and that they deliberately use every trick in the book to tap into our psychological weaknesses and make us act irrationally. But I have the feeling that, 90% of the time, scammers are just told to write an "official-sounding" message – which is the same thing that the hypothetical human who wrote this template was trying to do: that's why the result is so similar. No doubt the use of the word "urgent", or capitalizing the words "Duty" and "Taxes", come from this attempt at making the message sound more formal and official, from someone who is definitely not a skilled writer.
Yep. It's a bit like the theory that scammers mention they're from Nigeria because they're ingeniously weeding out all the people who've heard of the scam before, and not because they need an excuse for people to send money to Nigeria (and with their culture and education level the ALLCAPS and religious references look very official and honest indeed), and if the cost of that is that 99.99% of their emails don't get delivered due to automatic filters protecting even the most gullible of recipients, well that's probably not something they've given much thought to.
I've read one interview with a scammer who mentioned that the initial pitch is deliberately written that way to screen for gullible people, and I've read extended email exchanges with Nigerian scammers where their broken English becomes flawless after the initial reply. 419eater.com was a treasure.
These days though, like most scams the 419 scams have been taken over by organized crime and worse. The average Nigerian scammer nowadays is probably doing it because Boko Haram will kill their family if they don't.
419eater is also full of scammers whose English notably deteriorates, scammers who have almost endless time to comply with bonkers requests, and scammers that are quite far into the discussion when they go to some effort to produce "official documents" that look like they were produced by a child. And personally, I've experienced the reverse, where even when it's a well constructed item-for-sale scam by someone with access to a PayPal account they can't help but use email addresses that look a bit too Nigerian to be an elderly Scottish lady and English that just doesn't match the ad copy and is obsessed with explaining the safety and urgency of the transaction rather than the "product". Most of the others have to mention Western Union to Nigeria at some point...
Just doesn't make much sense for people whose time is valued in cents per hour and whose theoretical earnings are in the thousands to optimise for screening out non-gullible people, plus the 99.9% of gullible people that have some sort of spam filter in the loop. But hey, if someone's shared that Microsoft Research paper with the scammers and they've come to believe that using formats that almost invariably bump into spam filters is actually a shrewd move on their part, who am I to discourage them?!
I don't know about Boko Haram involvement, but I assume the organized crime guys have some sort of MLM-style operation scamming Nigerians into paying for the get-rich-quick opportunity.
> I know this comes down to institutional incompetency
"Incompetency" is an interesting word.
The old maxim about incompetence versus malice suggests a binary
choice.
I prefer the more nuanced take that there is a spectrum of positions
between the two, and other dimensions that describe a cluster of
intents, both conscious and unconscious.
Take the UK Post Office scandal where we see incompetence layered on
top of malice, layered on top on incompetence. In some organisations
obviously deliberately harmful positions are written into "policy".
Often this comes under "PR" [fn:1]. More and more "AI" will be used to
disguise malintent and deflect scrutiny.
In the final episode of the ITV dramatisation [0], Alan Bates (played
by Toby Jones) delivers an absolutely shocking, knock down line. When
talking about incompetence and evil he says: "They're the same thing"
At some point there is no difference between incompetence and
evil. For a deeper psychological discussion of that listen here [1].
[fn:1] Edward Bernays seminal definition of public relations outlines
a creed of deception, manipulation and disinformation which is
antithetical to security [2].
