Look guys, if you are going to write and tell me that I’ve inherited $17m in someone’s will you might at least have the intelligence not to list another hundred or so people in the “to” field of the email. Doh!
I wonder where they got the list from though. I see an awful lot of addresses I recognize.
Back in August of 2006 I received a spam from one “Peter Wallace, Esq.” that had so many familiar names in the “Bcc:” that I decided to make a text copy of the “Bcc:”. I just took another look at it. Yes, your name and Kevin’s name are on it, along with many other sf fans and fan organizations.
It is one thing the mine fannish databases, it is another thing to send spam announcing the fact that fannish databases have been mined.
The way these things normally happen is that someone lets their PC get infected with a virus and the virus sends the copy of his Outlook address book to the spammers. Spammers have also harvested the online list of SF fans that John Lorentz put up years ago when the Internet was a much more innocent place.
In theory a mailing list mined from a single source is good targeted marketing. In practice the spammers are not normally that smart.
Couldn’t the deceased have just had a very large family? Duh!
Yeah, right, a family of 100+ people each of whom is the sole beneficiary of a $17m fortune. And a family that includes not only myself, but Pat McMurray, Anne Murphy and Patrick Nielsen Hayden.
But hey, if you know someone who will fall for that, I have this bridge that I want to sell…
What about the lonely girls called Erik or Jonathan or Brian who want to make your acquaintance?
Oh, there are all sorts – for example the people who claim that they can make me the man I have always wanted to be (and not in the Rockey Horror sense of “make me a man”).
My favorites at the moment are the ads for online casinos. One of them promises, “only fun and winning!” Well gee, I never knew that losing money could be so much fun.
Lol yeah, spammers are clueless and obnoxious. They’re sexist as well, because they all assume that I’m a guy and want a bigger wanger or that I’d be interested in looking at girlie pics so might be stupid enough to click their dumb malware links. Those with several identities are hilarious too. Yknow, the one with the name Sherry in the From: header but sign the email as being from David or something like that. Wow, talk about setting a world record for a sex change!