sometimes its worth reading your spam

[F15hguy]

and sometimes its not....

I don't mind the odd sam coming through, its to be expected,

but when its as bad as his it should get put into the joke email category...

Customers Service Hours–Monday To Saturday

Office Hours Monday To Saturday

Attention: Valuable Customer,

We have a Parcel containing an International Cashier Bank Draft/Cheque worth

the sum of Eight Hundred Thousand United State Dollars ($800.000.00 USD)

which will be deliver to you at the moment as long as you provide all the

requirement information to the FedEx package company before the parcel can be

shipped to your own residential address in your country. Furthermore, you

might be asking yourself how come this email, cheque or draft, Anyway, your

cheque was brought to our office by the Coca-Cola Bottling Company via a

Lottery Fiduciary Claim Agent, signifying that you are a rightful winner to

their Lottery Award Promo selected randomly which is powered by the Coca-Cola

Bottling and India Government.

just an excerpt, and the best spelled part of it

[Hamstar99]

lol. score. I read through the odd one as well. Get a few FedEx parcels and random estates peolple want to give me.

[Adrienne]

lol -

I have been receiving mass spam emails of varying nature, all offering me money, since I returned from overseas in July. 90+ percent of them originate from Africa and having spent 5 weeks over there during my time away, I figure my email address is well and truely fixed within their systems.

[F15hguy]

seriously though, if you fall for that one you almost deserve to be stung

[Adrienne]

True, they are so badly worded it is unbelievable. I had one this morning, only 2 lines but no way in the world should you believe its true.

[F15hguy]

worst one I saw was a job advertised on seek.co.nz , after applying and you get the job description you find out that you get a check, which you cash into your name, then you transfer the money to someone else after you take a cut out of it.

reported that one to the fraud people, sounds like a money laundering scheme to me... dunno what happened there

[Jaide]

"Furthermore, you

might be asking yourself how come this email, cheque or draft, Anyway, your

cheque was brought to our office by the Coca-Cola Bottling Company via a

Lottery Fiduciary Claim Agent, signifying that you are a rightful winner to

their Lottery Award Promo selected randomly which is powered by the Coca-Cola

Bottling and India Government."

I want to know!

[F15hguy]

no, go away, I'M the rightful winner!!!!

[Jaide]

"Furthermore, you

might be asking yourself how come this email, cheque or draft, Anyway, your

cheque was brought to our office ..." - you can keep your spam cheque, I want to know what happens next in the story :spop:

[F15hguy]

should I reply and have a little fun????

p.s. didn't wanna post the whole email as it was quite long, anyone wanna see???

[Caryl]

Never reply to those things. They on-sell your email address as a valid one and you will be inundated with even more spam

[Ira]

Never reply to those things. They on-sell your email address as a valid one and you will be inundated with even more spam

It's ok, I just reply using Henward's email as my return address...

[Jaide]

I was curious to know their reason for why the cheque went from here to there before being sent to you :spop:

[alanmin4304]

I never open that sort of rubbish in case there is something nasty included in there that could make my computer unwell or too talkative.

[A-town...]

It's ok, I just reply using Henward's email as my return address...

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! :sml1:

[GrahamC]

One theory as to why the grammar is so poor in these spam is that it is designed to select the gullible. They want to filter out all those smart enough realize it's all crock.

So, filter out the ones who will readily spot the scam to save themselves a bit of effort, and just get contacted by the rest. There was an article on this that I read ... and of course ... I think it's all rubbish!

[David R]

I had one from Col. Muammar Ghaddafi around the time Lybia was being invaded. Have also have had one from a bogus-looking fish exporter from Nigeria...

[Sophia]

GrahamC, that theory is rubbish indeed

[GrahamC]

Courtesy of Microsoft Research Labs http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/1677 ... igeria.pdf

ABSTRACT

False positives cause many promising detection technologies

to be unworkable in practice. Attackers, we

show, face this problem too. In deciding who to attack

true positives are targets successfully attacked, while

false positives are those that are attacked but yield

nothing.

This allows us to view the attacker’s problem as a

binary classification. The most profitable strategy requires

accurately distinguishing viable from non-viable

users, and balancing the relative costs of true and false

positives. We show that as victim density decreases the

fraction of viable users than can be profitably attacked

drops dramatically. For example, a 10× reduction in

density can produce a 1000× reduction in the number

of victims found. At very low victim densities the attacker

faces a seemingly intractable Catch-22: unless he

can distinguish viable from non-viable users with great

accuracy the attacker cannot find enough victims to be

profitable. However, only by finding large numbers of

victims can he learn how to accurately distinguish the

two.

Finally, this approach suggests an answer to the question

in the title. Far-fetched tales ofWest African riches

strike most as comical. Our analysis suggests that is an

advantage to the attacker, not a disadvantage. Since

his attack has a low density of victims the Nigerian

scammer has an over-riding need to reduce false positives.

By sending an email that repels all but the most

gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to

self-select, and tilts the true to false positive ratio in his

favor.

So, this suggests that the way to foil these spammers is for everyone to reply no matter how silly the spam is ( use a throwaway email account ). This so increases their work to find suitable victims as to perhaps make the whole scam unprofitable.

I do this too. When people ring up from Microsoft security to explain that my PC is infected and slow ... I keep them on the phone as long as I can! It costs them time, and perhaps money ( unless they're stealing someone's voip services ), and renders the task of finding a victim much harder.

[Sheepsnana]

When people ring up from Microsoft security to explain that my PC is infected and slow ... I keep them on the phone as long as I can! It costs them time, and perhaps money ( unless they're stealing someone's voip services ), and renders the task of finding a victim much harder.

I often ask how they connect my phone number (which they tell me they got out of the phone book) with my IP address. They then ask what an IP address is... :facepalm:

[GrahamC]

Probably not the best way to waste their time by being smart You might get them to refine their attack strategy.

I remember some pressure cooker type investment group kept calling me from London ( think it was actually Thailand though ) to buy some promising shares. I kept them going for months getting them to call me back. I think I managed to sell a couple of houses to raise the funds necessary to buy their great shares!! It was highly entertaining.

[blueether]

I own please-spam.me.uk so can have [email protected] as an email. Funnily I never had spam to any of those address (ok, maybe 3 or 5 in the last 5 or 6 years)