As a former SendGrid customer, I have to assume that my email was breached in a hack (or maybe some bad actors scraped my domain?).

Either way, whoever is behind this gets (utterly despicable) points for creativity.

Many folks wonder why emails from scammers look so fake—“I’m a prince worth USD$4.000.000” or “MicroSoft Account Warning.”

The prevailing wisdom has been that it’s less effort to swindle a mark who is blind to the warning signs, and that scammers would rather not waste time with the geek who knows tech.

This email pattern has been consistent: any event that strikes a chord—pride month, police funding, BLM—becomes a “new footer” I’m warned will be added to my messages by default.

The format is perfect. It looks exactly like a real SendGrid product update. The tone is measured. The “Manage Account Preferences” button is right where you’d expect it. And the emotional hook—a personal note about Iran, family, freedom—is designed to make you feel guilty for not clicking.

What was once a vector we thought was reserved for less technologically-versed people is now something that is low-cost enough for bad actors to pursue across all sorts of populations—especially those who might have items of value worth exploiting.

My Dad jokes, when I tell him to not use the same password, that he’s not all that interesting of a target, and that as a regular ol’ citizen, he’s not worth hacking.

He’s a noble man who would for sure say “if you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to hide.” And while that’s true for him and probably many of you as well, the problem isn’t “are you doing something that makes you a target” (wrongdoing or otherwise).

It’s that you don’t have to be a target anymore.

You just have to be reachable.

The economics of scamming have changed. It used to cost real money and real effort to craft a convincing phish—you needed design skills, domain knowledge, decent English.

Now, an LLM can generate a pixel-perfect SendGrid email in seconds, localized to any language, personalized to any current event, at essentially zero marginal cost. The “prince from Nigeria” era is over.

The new era is emails that look exactly like the ones you’re expecting.

So no, Dad, it’s not about whether you’re interesting enough to hack. It’s about whether it costs someone more than $0.002 to try. And if anyone calls you saying they’re me, ask them why I can’t eat ravioli to this day, just to be sure 😄