In April, the British department store chain Marks & Spencer fell victim to a ransomware attack, partly because the scammers spoke perfect English.
Since the early days of the Nigerian Prince email scam—the one promising recipients millions if they’ll just reply with their bank details—we’ve spotted cybercrooks by their grammatical mistakes. (Don't blame the web for this: long before the internet, the Nigerian Prince scam unfolded via snail mail!)
The Nigerian Prince scam frequently contains questionable grammar and usage.
As tech services at Australia’s Southern Cross University warns, “Often English is not a primary language for the hackers, so they don’t have great spelling and grammar. Its [sic] often very easy to tell a scam on this point alone.”
The broken English of those phishing emails and texts you’re getting suggest that they come from Russia or eastern Europe, and indeed, most hackers are based in that part of the world.
But Scattered Spider, the group behind the Marks and Spencer attack, are a loose coalition of Americans and Brits who used proper English to gain access to the company’s secure servers. Once they breached the firewalls, they encrypted the data they found and paralyzed the company. So far M&S has lost something north of £650 million, and weeks after the attack, the company is still struggling to reboot.
Weeks after a cyberattack, Marks and Sparks is still trying to reboot.
Today, some 70% of Americans feel that speaking English says, “you’re one of us.” Speak a different language and you must be up to no good. That’s why Donald Trump warned last summer, “We have languages coming into our country . . . they have languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of. It’s a horrible thing.” And it’s why, on March 1, 2025, Trump issued an Executive Order declaring English the official language of the United States.
But speaking English as a sign “you’re one of us” is nothing new. In 1918, at the height of America’s involvement in Word War I, Iowa governor William Harding signed his own Executive Order banning foreign languages in public: in schools; on the streets; on streetcars; on the trains; over the telephone; in public meetings; and in religious services. Speaking English proved you were a patriot. Using any other language suggested treason.
William Harding’s English-only Executive Order became known at the Babel Proclamation
Like Trump, Harding wasn’t daunted by the Constitution: for him, the First Amendment only guaranteed free speech in English. He made it clear as well that foreign-language worship wasn’t just unpatriotic, it was a waste of breath, since God only listens to prayers in English.
Gov. Harding on the futility of foreign-language prayer: “I am telling those who insist upon praying in some other language that they are wasting their time, for the good Lord up above is now listening for the voice in English.” [Quad City Times, June 2, 1918, p. 19.]
And when he was asked why he didn’t just ban German, since that was the language of the enemy, the governor explained that Germany had learned to spy in many different languages, so banning all of them would help win the war.
Surely if those German spies were any good they had also learned to spy in English, but Harding wasn’t about to ban English since he needed it for his re-election campaign.
And as the Marks and Spencer hack confirms, the bad guys can scam in flawless English. So if we don’t want to keep ransoming our data with crypto we’ll need more than the grammar police to keep our hard drives safe from hackers.
[Spoiler alert: Harding’s foreign language ban expired at the end of the war. In 1920, a scandal over his pardon of a convicted rapist led Harding to abandon his bid for re-election.]
