This arrived in my in-tray today:
It's just about the most unconvincing phishing email that I've ever seen. Notice the weirdly misspelled title and the un-English nature of the text.

I know that well-constructed phishing emails do often work but why would any crook waste his time on this pathetic travesty?

First attempt at their own work?

I had a disposable email and got tones of phishing - I actually replied to one entering in completely bogus info, and I actually got a off-script reply cussing and swearing at me because I wouldn't give them any real info

There was a study. They found it does not matter whether a scam is grammatically correct or not. People who know grammar do not fall for it regardless.

I got a fun one myself in my gmail spam folder, it reads:

Your package Atm Card have been registered with Post Office this morning and we agreed up that the delivery of your $65.11 compensation Parcel will take off tomorrow morning.So Get back with your full information, Contact Mr. Mike belly and TEL Number: +229-99-800- 785 Note,Try Send them the stamp Duty, fee of $40 with info bellow and the Tracking number of your package will be sent to you. receiver name CHIADI NNALUE country Benin republic question one answer LOVE amount $40usd Mr mark Ben

I am very tempted to actually activate its payload in virtual box under windows 10

Read the comments in any entry on any political site, even on social sites like Facebook or Google+, and you will know beyond any doubt that there are people who would fall for this, or any other scam extant.

There's one born every minute.

The spammers send out thousands of these. All they need is for three or four persons to bite.

There was a period there a few months back when I was getting dozens of emails pretending to be from banks I've never dealt with (and some I wouldn't deal with on a bet).

I've heard that the errors in grammar and spelling are quite deliberate. People with the "smarts" to notice the errors are not part of the target audience. The people sending those messages only want to hear back from those who are incapable of spotting the errors, and thus might be gullible enough to fall for the rest of the scam.

There's a risk involved in that. I always try to notify the organisations concerned that their name is being taken in vain. Most financial institutions (including PayPal) have a "spoof address" to which such messages can be forwarded. And of course I make sure that all the headers and the actual links (as distinct from link text) are included so that the ISPs concerned can be notified and the sites taken down. I'm sure many other concerned citizens do the same. So if these people do deliberately flag themselves up as fake, it's counter-productive.

I'd assumed the miss-spellings were a crude attempt to get past spam filters.

Everytime I empty my spam filters I learn two or three things.

First stuff like this where you do wonder what suckers are out there a'la P.T. Barnum's dream.

Secondly, how much they know about my browsing habits.

Thirdly, "what" they know about my browsing habits and/or exceptions.

Funnily enough, in answering a question on LQ, I looked up 3-D rendering and that form of graphics. For many weeks/months I kept getting advertisements about animated characters, anywhere from completely dirty to just stupid/fun stuff. That's just so not me it's funny. Odd that a one-time 5 minutes of browsing caused that.

Odder so that 5-10 minutes or so per day reading stories on baseball, football, basketball, ... and I never really see ads for sports paraphernalia, or related stuff. You'd think with me repeatedly reading stuff about that, that they'd latch onto that aspect of my personality right away.

I guess ESPN and Fox Sports are too tame ... I don't even get advice telling me to, "Dodge, Duck, Dip, Dive, and .... Dodge!"

OK fine! They know about me and redheads! My wife knows too!

That reminds me of the time SWMBO 'borrowed' my account for a quick bit of underwear shopping. She didn't even buy any but I was still getting the ads over a month later - and I'm pretty sure most of the items wouldn't have fitted me anyway.

I get those about once a month.

The first time I logged into paypal to check, now I just delete them

Well, here's a new wrinkle. I got another one today, also ostensibly from Paypal. But when I checked the link it provided, by hovering my mouse over it, it looked like a respectable site selling park homes in Iowa. Not the sort of people who you would expect to be doing Paypal spoofs.

So I opened a browser window and searched for "parks custom homes Iowa" and found the site at once. In the search results, it was labelled "This site may have been hacked". And indeed it had been. The site took me directly to another site called Vivastreet that sells prostitutes. All foreign names too which suggests to me that these are probably trafficked women.

I'm not sure if this is real phishing or just a very nasty form of advertising.

This sounds like a nasty form of advertising, but those two fish swim in the same pool.