Spam, a lot of it: Bubble tea is the Seoul of wit Your Spam Manager is holding 4 messages. Oh here we go... Subject: Customer Invoice Payment From an email address beginning "realestatetips"? I think not. Subject: PLEASE Update BANK DetaiLS Gosh yes that looks genuine, must open that later and run the attachment. Subject: Carreer oppurtunity As a literary agent, I …
There are worse pillow examples than that sun one (one for lonely on this day of love and profit maybe?).
Also had a banking spam recently which kinda gave itself away by greeting me as "Dear Barclays costumer" - obviously thought I was going to dress up in a stripey jumper and mask to hand over my swag bag?
But I used to enjoy the various devious and imaginative ways in which some nutter in another country would try to fool me out of my credit card details through the medium of an electronic message full of blatant falsehoods that even a household pet could spot.
That used to puzzle me too, until I discovered it might be a deliberate strategy to automatically select the most gullible marks - a theory elegantly advanced in this pdf from Microsoft Research.
I did wonder if Mr Dabbs felt that the hairbrush scam was a bit of a cruel joke, given his apparent lack of... need for one. So Clive James would also be more appropriate than Anneka there as well.
Thanks for letting us know what was in the safe though.
Lucky you. I get at least four of those every week:
Hello Web Mail User
Your account is being closed due to space. Click here to send your user name and password for an upgrade.
Sincerely,
Your Company Web Mail Administrator.
Often the "click here" is to one of those annoying free web pages/form services, which makes very easu for scammers to create the forms but almost impossible to report phising.
Sometimes instead of "Your Company" I get something like ${company_name}.
The quality of the scammers is going downhill!
news about the contents of the safe as well! ("yes, there is a key" makes sense now)
My own spam collection is rather small: it is a single email from one "Moses Harrington" entitled "particle accelerator 13 ballerinas". If my daughter decides to take up an interest in particle physics in a year or so, it may yet come in useful - both date from the same year :-)
Was a rather enchanting little piece to my work email address imploring me to buy an oscilloscope.
I'm guessing that because I downloaded some BSPs they think I actually do hardware. Mind you I've never been so tempted by spam. I mean I don't _need_ an oscilloscope, but it's something you can imagine always being handy.
*goes to dig out the mail and see if there were any good oscilloscopes in there*
Pics! I like a good laugh on a Friday.
That Korean spam is very odd. My favourite spam I received a few years ago had the subject line "Get thicker, longer hair!" - I have hair down to my arse and a full beard. The last thing I need is thicker, longer hair. :)
I work for a Korean company and our intranet looks like that. I swear one day my eyeballs will explode.
And no, I don't read a word of Korean. Which proved to be quite the disadvantage when I tried to use one of the space-age electronic toilets in the land of the Morning Calm. My morning wasn't very calm, I can tell you.
Just about all my spam these days is boring. A nephew got quite excited a few weeks ago when I received an email telling me the my video had topped the charts on a particular site, until I pointed out that I've never even posted a single photo on the web let alone a video to the 5-6 different hosts that keep telling me how popular it is.
It will hopefully stay in my office spam folder for eternity.
This is as much a mockery of myself, as the spammer in question.
It's one of those your bank's been accessed, fill in this form and send it back to us urgently ones. The form is probably going to be a malicious zip.
However in accordance with Murphy's law, the stupid spammer has forgotten to attach the file to the email. So I have visions of his servers churning out a few million of the buggers, only for him to spot the next day what he'd forgotten.
My record was sending a form out at work to 40 people to be filled in, with delivery and read receipts (as the buggers never returned them). I'd had about 70 emails ping back into my inbox already, in under 5 minutes, when I got the quick call to tell me I'd forgotten the attachment. Doh! About 150 emails later...
You say a household pet could spot obvious SPAM, but many Lecturers and Students at a (supposedly) top 5 UK University were more than happy to hand over their email account details to anyone who asked!
I spent several years explaining to various people that we never asked for these and the reason their account was now locked was that it had been used to spam half the planet.
Right now my inbox is enjoying a daily dalliance with emails from various US publications that inexplicably originate from Israel and seem only to point to web sites in Russia. But as you say, they do lack flair and style being deceptively plain - I might even go so far as to say that the Interweb spamming/phishing fraternity have become decidedly grey-flannel-suit professional.
In the days before email, when spam was nothing more than a rather nasty tinned meat and the subject of a Monty Python sketch, it was not uncommon for offices to receive Nigerian scams in the post.
They mostly appeared to have been laboriously produced on a pre-war manual typewriter, and the propositions were every bit as unconvincing as today's. I dare say the response percentage to postal spam is much greater than to emails, but even so it must have taken a lifetime of pounding, and a fortune in stamps, for the scammers to hook a victim.
My mother got a posted spam less than a year ago. At least it was in the mailbox, the post mark looked strange, so I wonder if it wasn't really just dropped in their directly. Anyway, it was something about how she's been awarded 2 free tickets by "US Airlines" (which isn't a real airline) and if she didn't act quickly to claim them, they might be "given to the alternate".
I just got one of those yesterday, it hasn't made its way into the bin yet.
It's a check, for $1000, redeemable only for 'airfare or alternate travel certificate'. I'm supposed to call a certain number to 'redeem' it. If I call within 48 hours of receiving it (how on Earth would they know?) I would be eligible for an additional $100 gas rebate voucher.
And, oh, this is my final notification, if I don't make contact with them by an unspecified date the $1000 and the $100 will be awarded to 'an alternate'.
Okay, _now_ it's in the trash.
"Did employees 30 years ago really while away their boring workdays browsing porn?"
That's nothing... while clearing out some old shelving at the back of our office, we discovered some photographs from about 25 years ago which feature some of the staff (*) celebrating a colleagues birthday in the office - complete with a couple of strippers.
Several of the staff in question are still with the company, and occupying senior positions, so clearly such behaviour wasn't frowned upon back then as it would be today.
(*) I very nearly put "several members of staff", before realising that such phrasing might be interpreted in a certain way when considered in context with strippers!
Today's hilarity is 'targeted' advertising. For all the information these companies claim to have on me, I have only, in the many thousands of supposedly targeted adverts tacked into sites I visit, received one such advert that had any relationship to anything in my life. Half the time they don't even get my gender right!
I got a personal email from Louis Freeh, Director of the FBI, using his personal Yahoo account from Hong Kong to let me know that the FBI had $26 million for me if only I would send them my banking details.
Such a pity that Mr Freeh had left office at the FBI several years before I got that note.
I think I don't currently have and in fact don't quite correctly remember two spam messages whose title struck me as amusing, but my brain insists that that was one of them. But it may not have been.
The other one was or wasn't "Do you want lager breasts?"
Is it OK to find "Attract men with large breasts" funny? I know they're around.
http://www.cracked.com/article_17270_100-unintentionally-hilarious-spam-subject-lines.html actually covers sender name as well as subject line.
I recently got one that said "We are (heir-hunting investigating company), did you have a relative with the same surname as you?" As of this year, as far as I know I do not - it is a good name though, isn't it?
I decided to pass it on to its e-mail hosting company (MyNet.com in, I dunno, Turkey or somewhere), the apparently genuine British heir-hunting agency, and the large Russian finance house with a London office, whose names were being abused - although it may happen all the time.
http://www.snopes.com/fraud/advancefee/inherit.asp is the scam, although my version only had point 1, and I think that page turned up in Google with the three words phrase that struck me as characteristically odd in the e-mail text, beginning with the word "standard". I thought it might be the actual name of a process and I was curious, but it seems only to appear here. Which is handy for looking it up.
I think I got an abbreviated one because then it isn't immediately clear that this is what it is. Unless you look it up to see if it's a well known spam.
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