I received the following text at 8:46am on a Saturday morning. I’ve gotten similar ones every few weeks for a while. The number was from outside the U.S.
Illinois Official Notice | Enforcement Warning Notice
Document Number: IL-DMV-2026-0322
Your traffic fine is overdue under Section 19C-19.173 of the Illinois Administrative Enforcement Code. Statutory enforcement proceedings will automatically commence after March 22, 2026, including:
- 30-day license suspension
- Vehicle registration freeze
- 35% late payment fee
- Entry of your violation record into the state credit and law system
Official payment platform: [link]
This notice is legally binding; please process it as soon as possible.
Before I “delete and report as junk,” I usually pause to identify the telltale signs of a scam. These used to be much more obvious, full of grammatical errors or non-idiomatic English. Although the latest ones are better, they still betray themselves, and I wonder how many people are actually taken in by them.
First, the repetition of “Notice” catches my eye. “Official” also appears twice and “enforcement,” three times. “Enforcement notice,” “enforcement code,” “statutory enforcement proceedings” sure sound big and important. The cumulative effect of the multisyllabic official-ese, though, is to make the whole thing sound too effortful. They’re trying too hard to convince me they’re for real. There exists an Illinois Administrative Code, but not an “Illinois Administrative Enforcement Code.” And what is the “state credit and law system”? Finally, this “legally binding” notice does not specify what the traffic fine is for, nor the amount, so that a “35% late payment fee” is a rather meaningless threat.
Compare the above to the actual “Notice of Red Light Violation” I just got in the mail based on camera footage of our car turning at one of the few “No Right on Red” intersections in town. The details of the violation and the penalty are clearly spelled out, with the option to view the video online and pay the ticket at the web address provided. The fine print explains, “This Notice of Violation depicts a Red Light Violation as shown in this photographic record obtained by a traffic control monitoring device. The recorded images have been reviewed and approved by a law enforcement officer of the municipality or county and have been found to show evidence of a violation of a red light signal and/or law pertaining to “Right Turn on Red.” Please note, all individuals appearing on the vehicle’s registration, lessees, or renters, if applicable, are legally responsible for this violation.”
There are similarities and the word “violation” appears multiple times. But, the language of bureaucracy is cold, not hot. There’s a “you must” and “you may” elsewhere on the notice, but it isn’t trying to raise alarm or scare me into clicking a link; it’s factual and neutral. The evidence gathered from the surveillance machinery is damning enough without additional intimations. To my ear, the scam language is a poor approximation. Its words flap and flutter to manufacture a vague urgency in place of detail that is not available. Which then leads me to ask, why isn’t it better? Is this the best that LLMs can do right now? Maybe it doesn’t need to be better in order to be effective.
I think these scams – as bits of language detritus – fascinate me, because they seem an extension of all the other language scams we are assaulted with on a daily basis in these times. Rhetorical violence perpetrated against facts, science, history, reality. I am increasingly on the alert in an increasingly noisy, fraudulent languagescape. Some part of me believes that spotting the infelicities of language in a scammy text is training my brain, building my scam detector or a kind of inoculation against bigger scams. Be careful out there, folks. And never click on the link, even (or especially) when it’s labeled “official.”
Contrary Frog 