I heard once that the reason that those phishing emails are (usually) pretty obvious is because the phisher doesn’t want to accidentally catch a more attentive and careful victim, spend time trying to wire money from them, only for the victim to realize that it’s a scam before following through, therefore wasting the phishers time. The type of person to fall for the Nigerian prince stuff is not common, but they exist and the odds of them paying out are much higher.
Depends on what the end goal is. Wire fraud? Sure. Typically a Business Email Compromise will try and compromise the account credentials to use it as a location to send other mass phishing attacks to their contacts, gain access to sensitive information the user had, or laterally move between systems and further compromise the organization. In that case, you would want the message to appear as legitimate as possible to gain access to the highest privileged accounts.
