It’s not often that I find spam entertaining, but I thought I would share the first paragraph of one I just received. It was “from” Mr. Laird Roberts and its subject was “Honestly I am just disappointed at your behavior.” What a slap in the face! It’s like you open the door, and there stands Moe, fuming.
Anyway, here is what I read, before I got bored and skimmed over the rest of the text:
“Honestly I am just disappointed at your behavior because you know that I am man of God and cannot deceive you. Just pay the $85.00 and leave me and my God because God is watching me if I am telling you lies. I know it is because of your past experience that make you not to believe me but I told you before my God who is my witness that I cannot deceive you because my bible says what shall it profit a man to gain material things and loose your soul. I told you earlier just drop your old experience and follow my instruction as a man of God and you will know what it means to follow somebody that fear God.”
Pretty novel approach, I must say. This spammer is not only incoherent (as one expects) but instantly sets off on a self-righteous tirade, dressing down the very person from whom he hopes to extract money. Really, how many rich, gullible, masochistic, religiously-guilty suckers are out there? I guess all of them will soon find out.
They purposely make them grammatically horrible and a little head-scratch-worthy, weeding out people smart enough to question it at some point.
Long time, no see! You may find this paper of interest (pdf): “Why do Nigerian spammers say they are from Nigeria” — link here: http://www.econinfosec.org/archive/weis2012/papers/Herley_WEIS2012.pdf
Thanks for checking in, Enrique. Interesting paper! Aligns with Rob’s comment on this. I thought you were on summer hiatus — I checked into Prior Probability the other day and saw that instead you have been very busy. Summer semester?