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Has there ever been a less effective spam email than this?
This must be part of a psychometric experiment meant to calibrate the features that predict response rates, with this version being way out on the low-predicted-response end of all the dimensions…
LisaRR said,
June 7, 2014 @ 8:22 pm
We once received a spam email at my office which began "Dear Victim" …
At least they were honest in that regard!
Álvaro Degives-Más said,
June 7, 2014 @ 8:35 pm
Considering the vast oceans of spam thundering hourly onto our Gmail accounts I believe the apparent newsworthiness of one wee missed spammy message is a strong endorsement of Gmail's overall vastly superior anti-spam measures. I'm sorry, I meant to say: vastly superior FREE anti-spam measures. Also, buy your gas chromatography–mass spectrometry supplies at Smith & Brothers dot com. Visit Smith & Brothers dot com, your friendly Canadian online pharmacy, plumbing, outdoor sports and forensic science supplier since 2013. Seriously. ONE spam message triggered an entire dedicated post on LL…?
hanmeng said,
June 7, 2014 @ 8:43 pm
@ Álvaro Degives-Más
ONE spam message not only triggered an entire dedicated post on LL, but also two responses–no, wait, three responses (and counting…)
mike said,
June 7, 2014 @ 9:26 pm
It's been suggested that spammers and scammers and the like actually don't want to try to fool you if you're remotely likely to figure out the scam. That would be a waste of their time, so they deliberately make the initial approach kind of dumb so as to only take in people who are reasonably likely to remain fooled.
Roger Lustig said,
June 7, 2014 @ 10:16 pm
Rachel from Card Services occasionally comes up on Caller ID as "Fraudulent Call."
Ben said,
June 7, 2014 @ 11:36 pm
"This must be part of a psychometric experiment meant to calibrate the features that predict response rates, with this version being way out on the low-predicted-response end of all the dimensions…"
Most likely conducted by hyperdimensional beings posing as mice.
Michael C. Dunn said,
June 7, 2014 @ 11:52 pm
@Roger Lustig: I think Rachel from Card Services calls more than anyone else to our No-Call List landline. If I weren't happily married I'd be flattered.
chrisj said,
June 8, 2014 @ 12:33 am
My favourite in this category remains the plain text spam I received many years ago that offered to sell me anti-aircraft missiles "suitable for all terrorist purposes".
Piyush said,
June 8, 2014 @ 2:45 am
Álvaro Degives-Más:
I believe the trigger for LL was the charming link asking the victim to "Click here to see this invitation in english(sic)" at the top of what is an uncharacteristically grammatical spam message (modulo the use of "send" instead of "sent").
herr doktor bimler said,
June 8, 2014 @ 3:25 am
I assume that "Discuss with him" is a typo for "discus".
Rubrick said,
June 8, 2014 @ 4:00 am
ONE spam message triggered an entire dedicated post on LL…?
Yeah, Christ, what are the inter-chats coming to??
Ray Girvan said,
June 8, 2014 @ 7:07 am
My favourite spams are those where the sender (or their algorithm) has a crass inability to understand plausibility of names. In 2013 I had a Russian spam professing undying love – "I am a sweet and friendly Lady and my dream in life is to meet the favorite man for me" – but any first impressions were destroyed by the portly Johnsonesque sender name: "Alderman R Jacobs".
Rod Johnson said,
June 8, 2014 @ 11:12 am
I thought the interesting part was "Do you think this email is a spam? Click here." Now I expect to see a message that says "Click here to report this message as spam" followed by some sort of clickjacking.
Matt said,
June 8, 2014 @ 7:23 pm
I see messages like that already – obvious spam, and a link at the bottom saying "Click here to be removed from our mailing list." But changing it to "Do you think…?" is a kind of fiendish way of activating the less contemplative parts of the brain. ("Unless and until you click here, we'll keep assuming that you're too dumb to realize that this is spam, and you basically just have to sit there and take it.")
Andrew Bay said,
June 9, 2014 @ 8:46 am
You might want to see this research: http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/167719/whyfromnigeria.pdf
It has been figured that the scammers need to filter out the smart people.