Me give you $14 squillion gadziddly-dillion

Gently amusing :)

Obligatory reminder - 419Eater.com, come and play with our advance fee fraud brethren. In return for them trying to steal your money (or if you're way too savvy to be fooled, how about your parents, grandparents? Lawyers and doctors fall for this shit, clearly not idiots per se, so let's skip the name-calling), you get to waste their time and efforts, lower the batting average, make crime less lucrative. All skills wanted, social engineering skills taught and honed, but if you'd rather shut down fake bank websites, or counsel victims, or become a master baiter [sic], whatever - there's a place for you at Eater.

Disappointed

I feel left out, alI get are emails from banks and similar telling me I neeed to log in and sort out my security details.

That or my email account is moving somewhere else (odd that my email account has changed owners/handlers/servers a few times but the name hasn't altered)

Anyway -- my 419 Tshirt is worn out, I need another one - if for no other reason than that I love the attempts to tell me that 'My money went to Nigeria and all I got was this lousy t-shirt' is racist.

Dear Lewis

Please keep Dabbsy.

So I'm not the only one then

Rather than bulk deleting spam, I still find myself picking out the odd interesting nugget. I put it down to incurable nosiness.

So many of them are so boring and professional nowadays. It's rather disappointing. Just subject line of please see invoice, and then a nasty attachment. Where's the panache in that?

Whereas nothing can beat the emphasis that capital letters bring to a grammatically incorrect, appallingly spelled missive. Not just $10,000,000, or even ten million dollars. No, that's not exciting. Who would be attracted by something so boring and businesslike as that? But TEN MILLION DOLLARS just shouts MONEY!!!!

I carefully kept a favourite spam message for months. It was your bog standard nasty attachment, with a small paragraph to persuade you to open it. But amusingly they fell into the trap that so many of us have, they'd forgotten to attach the attachment. I wonder how many million they sent out, before they noticed?

Madrid Barajas Airport

You can tell it was a fake because they actually got into contact with you. The real Madrid Barajas Airport would already have all your contact details in triplicate but wouldn't be arsed to notify you at all.

Sounds familiar.

"It’s like a dear old friend has knocked on the door bearing a box of chocolates and a bottle of port – with the obvious caveat that both the box and the bottle are empty."

Kinda like the BOFH?

"Hi Dabbsy, it’s Lewis. Your columns don’t seem to have very much to do with real computing any more. They’re turning into a shoddily researched and poorly written, not to mention tardily submitted, excuse to sting us with an invoice every week. Your ideas are old and your jokes are unfunny. Buck your ideas up, sunshine, or you’re out."

Indeed. See above.

Only the gullible

I quite like the freakonomics theory that the scammers know their ploy is blatantly obvious and it's a tactic to filter out all but the super-gullible.

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-nigerian-scam-emails-are-obvious-2014-5

And here's another

To: randomemailname@randomemailprovider

From: aparentanglosaxonname@woulrbeseo.com

(paraphrased)

We are so expert in everything internet-related that we're the dogs bollocks in SEO. We don't send spam. Just send us money and tell us the site you want promoting because it would be a waste of our time using our vast skills to work it out.

Signed with a distinctly un-Anglo-Saxon name

The strange thing is that one of these landed in my internet /dev/null - AKA Hotmail/Live/Outlook/${this year's favoured brandname} addressed to someone else completely with absolutely nothing in the headers to tell how it got there apart from the fact that it originated from a Hotmail/etc user & possibly their internal routing has gone wrong.

He had a very good heart and loved to give out.

translation his heart gave out.

Amusing spam

A few years ago I spent quite some time tweaking my spam filter. No, that's not a euphemism. As part of this process I read a lot of spam, and still study the odd message now and again. Anyway, as I looked at the messages, I found some of them so hilarious that I would forward them to friends. Sadly I no longer receive amusing spam in English, though very recently I've started to receive a lot of Russian and Chinese spam which I can't understand. I can only hope that the content of these messages is just as ridiculous as the classic 419 messages of yesteryear.

I'll pass this one along

I'm unable to meet the terms but it seems to be a good deal...

Dear Sir,

I'm the Almighty and I've been given your name by a select panel including 4 Popes, 2 Rabbis, and several lesser known Saints. I've decided to end the human existence on Earth at the end of the current year except for you and a partner of your choosing. There will be minions, but I'll get to that in a moment. You understand that I'm the only shareholder and this a business decision. The return on shareholder value wasn't what I expected for the last 100 centuries.

So, you and a partner of your choosing will now be the Lord and Masters of all that you survey and the rest of the planet also. In return, I ask for 100 Bitcoins to cover legal costs of all property and asset transfers so please forward me your account number and Bitcoin Exchange you prefer. Also, please forward me your email contact list so that I can inform them that they are your minions and subservient to all your wishes.

Sincerely,

God (also known by a bunch of other names),

billsmith@pearlygates.com

What could possibly go wrong

So your solution for spam is a push-button email account killer. I think you now have two problems.

Pathetic sharks!

"Zese sharks! Zey are crap!"

It takes guts to say Jesus

I miss the fake virus warnings from the turn of the millenium. It was always good to read what Microsoft, IBM and AOL had posted that morning and what incredible damage the virus would do once you opened the e-mail.

For example:

If you receive an email titled: "It Takes Guts to Say Jesus"

DO NOT OPEN IT. It will erase everything on your hard drive.

This information was announced yesterday morning from IBM; AOL states that

this is a very dangerous virus, much worse than "Melissa," and that there is NO Remedy for it at this time.

Some very sick individual has succeeded in using the reformat function from

Norton Utilities causing it to completely erase all documents on the hard

drive.

It has been designed to work with Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet

Explorer. It destroys Macintosh and IBM compatible computers.

This is a new, very malicious virus and not many people know about it. Pass

this warning along to EVERYONE in your address book ! and please share it

with all your online friends ASAP so that this threat maybe stopped.

Please practice cautionary measures and tell anyone that may have access to

your computer. Forward this warning to everyone that you know that might

access the Internet.

Fool me twice...

I particularly enjoyed the emails claiming to come from the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission in Nigeria, offering to compensate victims for money lost in 419 scams. Just send your bank details etc to westernunionlagos@noreally.com.tw to claim your money back...