Spam...

Randy Cassingham's excellent spam (email spam, not the meat product) primer.  You should read this even if you think you know everything about spam...

Loterie Nationale

Most of the time, spam emails just tick me off. My email address is public enough that it has been discovered by just about every purveyor of ripped email addresses, and as a consequence I get hundreds of these damned things every day. I use Thunderbird as my email client, and its built-in junk mail filters do a bang-up job — but still, a few get through every day. This morning I found this gem in my inbox, having escaped Thunderbird’s junk filters:

NOTIFICATION FROM THE LOTERIE NATIONALE

We are delighted to notify you of the result of the LOTERIE NATIONALE quarterly award program. In accordance with the world lottery ordnance, you authorized as an official lottery prize winner to immediately file in for your claims upon receipt of this mail.

This is an online promotional program organized by LOTERIE NATIONALE. A total number of various individual email addresses and companies alike were entered for the Free Lotto Automatic Subscription Ticket Game. Details were submitted by international email service providers/marketing companies including public service providers strictly for this exercise. No ticket was sold.

Bear in mind that prizes will strictly be remitted to winners that officially file in for their claims within the given time frame. To begin your claim process, you are advised to immediately contact our program coordinator with the details below.

MRS. JANET DAAL.

Global Consult

Tel: +31 [redacted]

Email: [redacted]@excite.it

Note that all winnings must be claimed within 10 working days from the date of this notification; any unclaimed prize will be returned to the treasury of the organizing firm as unclaimed prize.

(NB) You are to file in for the claim of Two Million Five Hundred Thousand United States Dollars ($2,500,000.00) under category “A”. Here are your winning details:

Batch Number: LN-DN0TR764

Ticket Number: LN-TW09XV51

Ref Number: LN-883M09

Lucky Number: 554-20-501

Serial Number: LN/ERS

Congratulations once more and thank you for being part of our quarterly promotional program.

Yours truly,

KARL SCHOLTEN

The first thing that caught my eye — and what stopped me from deleting it immediately, as I usually would — was the phrase “world lottery ordnance”. Now I’m sure they really meant “world lottery ordinance", but the spelling they actually used raises all sorts of humorous questions. How, exactly, do you turn a “world lottery” into some kind of heavy weapon? Hmmmm… Perhaps you print a bazillion lottery tickets, pack them into a nice aerodynamic casing, and then drop them on some terrorist’s head? Hah!

The second paragraph is typical of these spams: a pathetic attempt to make a plausible case for why I should have been randomly selected to win $2.5M, in a way that benefits no company or government. And of course there’s the line calculated to build a sense of urgency: I have only 10 days to take action, or I’ll lose all this money!

You gotta love all the official sounding details, too. Not only do I get a ticket number, but also a batch number, a serial number, a reference number, and even a lucky number. Wow! This must be for real, with all that specific information on it!

I redacted the (Italian) email address and (Dutch) phone number, because I don’t want to be responsible for anyone actually contacting this scammer. I’m not sure what would happen if you did contact them, but most likely it would involve getting your bank or credit information — I can’t imagine what else they’d be after.

It never ceases to amaze me that such unsophisticated spams actually work — but they must, or nobody would go to the trouble of sending them off.

"World lottery ordnance”. Heh.

Deteriorating Spam?

I have the feeling that the quality of spam is going down, and rapidly. What that means is anyone’s guess (assuming that I’m even right). I had to search through today’s spam to find one that I was comfortable reprinting — some are so awful that I feel the need to cleanse myself somehow. Good thing I’m going to be taking a shower here shortly! Anyway, here’s one of the over 200 spams I received today, verbatim except I redacted a few things that might actually help the spammer:

Subject: FW: Elof Your cheaper health commodities are in order.

To: <redacted>

From: <redacted>

Elof

I’m sending this your way.

Karoline

— — — -Original Message — — — -

From: Rufus [mailto:xu@kdpp.com]

Sent: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 10:53:10 -0700

To: Logan

Subject: Roseanne Obtain your curing products for less money from our on

line shop.

Ciao Mathilde,

No one can make obtaining your treatments exhilerating, but at least our

e-pharmacy can make it effortless. Manage your PMS by intake our product.

Find all the brand name enhancers and more in our shop. Our ever-enlarging

patron cluster has allowed us to be a wonderous success amongst pharmacies.

<URL redacted>

Effective item, sold at min price. E purchase in bulk & save more.

Fed up with queuing up for forever in druggist lines? We have your remedy!

Cheers

Jenette

"Three times,” reserve universe percent said the Professor. in the pictures

of him), ghost humour while the rest waited in silence. theory At HNp

threw down the trademark strip routine of wood irritably.

Do you find this convincing? Does it make you wanto click on that link to buy some drugs? Do you feel safe giving your credit card information to the writer of this?

It’s hard for me to imagine that spam of such low quality could possibly succeed. I hope it’s true that I don’t know anyone who would consider responding from this. Certainly not my blog readers! Maybe some distant New Jersey relative…

But this starts me on a ponder… I get so many of these atrocious spams that I wonder if in fact they actually are successful. Surely if they were failures they’d all quickly go away — who would go to all this trouble for nothing? Because email is free, the spammer needs only a very small percentage of responders to succeed. So follow the thought — let’s say that the email above actually did succeed, with a response rate of, oh, say, a paltry 0.0001%. Let’s say it was sent to 10 million people. That works out to 10 responses (if I did my math right). From the spammer’s point of view, that’s 10 sales (or more likely, 10 stolen credit card numbers), with zero marketing cost. The only problem is that 9,999,990 of us have to suffer.

And that gets me to my real point, to wit: if these awful spams actually are successful (from the spammer’s perspective), isn’t that kind of scary? I mean, who are these people who actually respond to something like this? Could there really be that many people missing such a high percentage of their little gray cells? What group of people is so divorced from reality that they’d fall for something like this? Can you think of one?

Of course you can! POLITICIANS! BWA HA HA HA!

I feel better about spam already!

Revenge

I don’t know if this is for real, but … I sure like the concept!

Tired of receiving mounds of unsolicited letters and offers in the mail? Want to fight back? Want to get rid of that old tire in your garage that the garbage man won’t take? Then read on…

If you’re curious why this document was developed, it was due to the hundreds of unsolicited letters sent to me by a very annoying company called MCI. They love to mail people unsolicited letters 1-2 times per week despite requesting to be taken off their mailing lists. Well, here’s a completely LEGAL way to fight back against idiots like MCI. You can mail their junk back to them for FREE using their own postage-paid envelopes. The only catch is that it will be attached to 50 lbs of additional junk you’ve gathered from around your house (rocks, bricks, old shingles, etc.). This works, so please read on…

Read the whole thing here.