[WARNING!!!] New Bittrex.com / Blttrex.com phishing attempt detected!

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Recently, a new bittrex.com scam was recently detected where unsuspicous users are tricked into providing their login details on a fake website.

Scammers continously register fake domains which look similar to the original versions, but are not the same and are just mere attempts to steal your login credentials.

Be extra careful in double-, triple-checking the website address whenever you login on any cryptocurrency exchange.

To understand the psychological effect these scammers are trying to exploit, please scroll down below for more information.

Psychological explanation: "Generalization" and the "The Stroop Effect"

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University of Sheffield psychologist Tom Stafford explains in an interview with Wired:

""When you're writing, you're trying to convey meaning. It's a very high level task," he said. As with all high level tasks, your brain generalizes simple, component parts (like turning letters into words and words into sentences) so it can focus on more complex tasks (like combining sentences into complex ideas). "We don't catch every detail, we're not like computers or NSA databases," said Stafford. "Rather, we take in sensory information and combine it with what we expect, and we extract meaning."

Source: https://www.wired.com/2014/08/wuwt-typos/

Generalization effect

The brain does not look at the what exactly is written, but it is looking at the meaning of what is written. This explains why it is so hard to recognize one's own spelling mistakes; what the eye is seeing is conflicting with what the brain has already simulated. The more you are familiar with your own written text, the harder it is to spot abnormalities as the brain already made up a "mental map". The brain is going through the same process when it is imprinting the traffic route from home to work for example. The brain is effectively trying to make things more efficient so it can focus on other tasks.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalization_(learning)

The Stroop Effect

The psychological explanation for misinterpreting seemingly correct information, is called the "Stroop" effect. There are many variations on the Stroop effect, but the most popular one relates to the word/color test where test subjects are presented with written words such as blue, green, yellow, however the color of the words are not consistent with their meaning. ("Blue" written in a red shade, or "Yellow" written in a green shade, etc.) The response time for subjects to say the word out loud is much shorter if the meaning and font of the word are consistent.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect

Jumbled letters

According to Matt Davis from Cambridge, he explains that the following text originally appeared on 2003 and has been floating around the internet ever since:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Source: http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/cmabridge/

The reason why it is not that difficult to understand the jumbled letters above according to Matt: "the human mind does not read every letter by itself, but the word as a whole."

If you notice carefully, the first and last letter of each word is correct, however all the remaining letters in the middle are juggled around. Apparently, the location of the first and last letter of a word are crucial for the human brain to obtain understanding of the word. However, this is not the only contributing factor. If you read the last sentence of the paragraph above closely, "is", "the", "not", "by", "but", "the", "as", and "a" are all spelled correctly.. As to conclude what how the brain processes these jumbled letters, academic linguists are still heavily debating and have not reached consensus. But the earlier mentioned points are definitely important factors.

Finally, here is another example from National Geographic: