Posted on Wednesday 17th of January 2007 at 14:21 in The Internet

Single worst spam attempt ever

Every day I receive the same piece of spam in my unfiltered 'general' email address inbox and I really really don't understand it. I fully appreciate the motivation behind the "My father died and left me $1,000,000,000,000,000 dollars, if you can accept it in your bank account we will let you keep 45% of the value" because that's a simple case of phishing for bank details that can then be misused. Therefore directly benefiting the spammer, yes? Then explain to me the benefit of this recurring inbox nightmare.

The spam

Thank you for your loan request, which we received yesterday, your refinance application has been accepted Good Credit or Not, We are ready to give you a $325,000 loan, after further review, our lenders have established the lowest monthly payments. Approval process will take only 1 minute. Please visit the confirmation link below and fill-out our short 30 second Secure Web-Form. www.someURL.com

What it means
It's telling me that I made a loan application that they've approved and can now give me in excess of $300,000. Why would I EVER want that? Loans are something you pay back with a predictably high-ish level of interest so it's got to be the LEAST likely thing I would ever want? So they're telling me that they've accepted something I've not applied for. If they were saying I'd won $300,000 then that would make sense because someone, somewhere would click on that. Who is going to want $400,000 of debt they never requested? Utter madness

No imagination
Another one that really tickled my fancy was this gem:

CONGRATULATIONS! YOUR EMAIL ACCOUNT / ADDRESS HAS WON. FROM: PROMOTIONS DEPARTMENT OF MICROSOFT / STAATLOTERIJ, WINNING NOTICE FOR CATEGORY "A" WINNER. Ref. No: LSLUK/2031/8161/07. BATCH NUMBER: 14/011/IPD. Email:Netpointagency01@aim.com

Nothing sings realism like an untargeted introduction from an "importantcompany@aim.com". It's just like the eBay emails you receive from "ebaydisputes@hotmail.com". Does anyone actually believe some of these? There's just no imagination.

Better spam
We've all seen the better ones, such as this gem that I received a few months ago:



That's what I call spam. It came from a something@ebay.com email address, but was subject to a few glaring omissions. Such as my username (slight giveaway). A misspelling of "escalate" towards the bottom doesn't add any more realism but I feel that someone like my mother may actually be conned by this. She would not however, ever, click on something offering her $300,000+ of debt. I really don't understand the motivation for that particular one.

 

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