A New Twist on Spam

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.

Read 3 comments below | Read other posts in News and Comment

3 responses to A New Twist on Spam

  1. Rob says:

    They purposely make them grammatically horrible and a little head-scratch-worthy, weeding out people smart enough to question it at some point.

  2. Enrique says:

    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

  3. Craig says:

    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?

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