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I've found an old MathGroup discussion on this topic from where I learned that StringCases and StringPosition don't have the abbreviated string pattern option, and that Verbatim forces StringMatchQ to match two strings literally: StringMatchQ["\\*", Verbatim["\\*"]] returns True.

I've found an old MathGroup discussion on this topic from where I learned that StringCases and StringPosition don't support abbreviated string patterns, and that Verbatim forces StringMatchQ to match two strings literally: StringMatchQ["\\*", Verbatim["\\*"]] returns True.

###Update

I've found an old MathGroup discussion on this topic from where I learned that StringCases and StringPosition don't have the abbreviated string pattern option, and that Verbatim forces StringMatchQ to match two strings literally: StringMatchQ["\\*", Verbatim["\\*"]] returns True.

Note also that escaping with single backslash is meant for Mathematica's internal metacharacters like < and > (and obviously for n, t and r etc. but with another counting) as described in this answer by John Fultz:

Note also that escaping with single backslash is meant for Mathematica's internal metacharacters like < and > (and obviously for more common n, t and r etc. but with another counting by StringLength) as described in this answer by John Fultz:

The following demonstrates a possible bug (for the string "\*" length must be 2 because * isn't an internal metacharacter of Mathematica and it needs not be escaped inside of an ordinary string):

StringLength["*"]
StringLength["\*"]

1

1

StringLength["\x"]

Syntax::stresc: Unknown string escape \x.

2