Even after several months SB continues to get hits on the posts “Messing With Spammers” and “Messing With Spammers, Part Deux.” Seems the gr8tits2play racket is alive and well.
What’s really scary is that Gr8tits2play.org got more ad clicks than SB this month.
I’d write more about dating scams, but I haven’t been trolling Craigslist recently.
That doesn’t stop me from getting ridiculous e-mail spam. I’m not talking about Nigerian 419 scams either. Those got boring a good 10 years ago. No, I get e-mail from people claiming to be Gareth and Catherine Bull, who are real winners of a EuroMillions lottery apparently wanting to share their winnings with a random American such as yours truly. Of course, the Bulls won the lottery nearly two years ago. In addition they’re from the UK, but the e-mail I received is from a student account at the Autonomous University of Madrid in Spain, apparently from someone named neither Gareth or Catherine.
Oops.
It’s not just stuff like that though. Since I have an LLC I occasionally get business-related spam. Unfortunately I don’t have near the hit count people like Maddox out in Salt Lake City do (at least not yet; there’s always hope). Accordingly I don’t get the opportunity to create epic takedowns such as his wedding veil “review” from a few months ago.
Watch and come on back. NSFW.
What I do get is e-mail utilizing a Colombian university domain and a Taiwanese reply address from someone claiming to be in North Carolina asking me about my “products.” This elicits two responses: 1) What products? and 2) What?
No seriously, what?
Where to begin? Even if I forgive “United state” as a typo, it’s obvious whoever wrote this is not only not from North Carolina, but has never been anywhere even close to there in his life. There’s no such place as Quatics, North Carolina. North Carolina ZIP codes never start with 7. The phone number has a nonexistent area code. Oh yeah, and both the ZIP code and phone have too many freakin’ numbers to begin with. I have no idea what this guy’s angle is. I’m not at all convinced he knows either.
Those are relatively isolated incidents though. The spam that really floors me originates from a tongue-in-cheek personal ad I posted on Craigslist earlier this year. I got an obvious fake reply in the form of poorly written sexual innuendo followed by images obviously lifted off a third-rate porn site followed by a link to a malicious Facebook app. In other words, not exactly the stuff I’d expect from lonely women from Eagle. I made the mistake of replying with some smartass comment I can’t seem to recall.
Ever since then I’ve been getting spam from these idiots using pretty much every ISP in the Ukraine. Every single freakin’ day, sometimes twice a day. For MONTHS. I long since created a filter that sends these e-mails directly to the trash unread, but I’m still getting them. Wow. And I thought Wikipedia administrators had too much time on their hands.
They’re not even using girls’ names either to get me all hot and bothered, or something. No Barbies or Bambis or anything like that. Instead they use obviously fake (and often not even feminine) names apparently generated at random by people who neither know their target audience nor are smart enough to care. Names such as Palamino Swiggum, Heiermann Sandman, Boscarino Critz and Zywiec Tuong.
Definitely not this Zywiec, which is worth trying out.
Image credit: TheBeerReporter.com
Indeed, the spam of today makes the original 419 scams look like Shakespearean sonnets by comparison.
