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Comment by hm10 | Hacker News Reader

Seems like a publicity stunt. The scammer's email reads quite unauthentically - like someone was contracted out to run this campaign. "After selling this gift card, we can earn approximately $50, which is three weeks income for one family."

...yeah, hard to believe this message was written organically. Use a few soundbites like these, get some articles published mentioning a counter-movement to leave 5-star reviews. Smart business.

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As a skeptic, this thought crossed my mind as well. But if you were trying to make your business look more sympathetic, the initial ask would be for more money. No one would fault you for not sending $2,000, whereas some might say $75 is like a small donation.

Eh, they have a sob story about potentially being exploited again all ready.

Plus, $75 in some sense is more shocking than $2,000 – you can perhaps visualize paying $75 to get rid of some negative reviews, and that combined with the lurid "this is three weeks income for poor people" catches your imagination.

I am on board with the parent comment, this sounds like a publicity stunt.

If it starts happening to a bunch of companies whose founders frequent HN, we'll know it's a contagious publicity stunt!

Sorry. That looks like a typical scammers email. They are not authentically written.

There are a couple of other sentences as well that stood out to me. The overall apologetic tone, language, and phrases used in the email have some subtleties that are hard to imagine being used by a native Indian speaker, or by someone raised in India. It starts making more sense if you re-read it applying a western lens, i.e., how a westerner would imagine an Indian scammer to write, without being exposed to the nuances you find in regular Indian communication. What I'm trying to say is that if you're a native speaker of any Indian language, it is not difficult to see if a sentence originated by "thinking" in English vs in the native language:

"no other choice"

"the fact is"

"no other way to survive"

"we are begging you"

Here's the full text of the spammer's email:

> Hello. Unfortunately, negative feedback about your establishment has been left by us. And will appear in the future, one review a day. We sincerely apologize for our actions, and would not want to harm your business, but we have no other choice. The fact is that we live in India and see no other way to survive. We are begging you to send us google play gift card worth $75 You can buy the card directly from PayPal paypal.com/us/gifts/brands/google-play Or in any store selling gift cards We hope that this amount will not be critical for you. After selling this gift card we can earn approximately $50, which is three weeks of income for one family Please send the code to the email address vict2665@proton.me and we will immediately stop leaving negative feedback and remove the existing ones.

Once again, we apologize.

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