Hacker laziness
It always bugs me that these scams are so shoddily finished off. The idea is sound: use the advertised job appication to find a legitimate way to send someone an attachment, but why is the covering email a) so generic and b) so poorly written? There must be countless sample covering letters available on tinterweb, just leaving the need to autofill the relevant job position and making up a name.
It strikes me as the equivalent of going to the trouble of obtaining genuine bank note paper with all the security features, and then painting on the design by hand.
@ttuk:
"While its disguised with a word icon, the file name is still clearly, MyResume.exe"
Indeed, but since Windows 95 "hide file extensions for known file types" is turned on by default. Maybe other OS's do this too, I personally can't stand it but obviously the masses aren't deemed capable of discerning between different types of files.