| Uncc < AaronSmith@stussy.jp> | Sat, Aug 10, 2013 at 7:11 PM | |
|
Reply-To: firstcontact001@rocketmail.com
| ||
|
|
||
The reason for this post today is to celebrate the 2000th time this particular e-mail from this particular person has been sent to my Scorpion Sting e-mail since 14 March 2013. Incredible right? But that’s not all folks, collectively my blogs have got this as a spam comment 483 times. Why? Why indeed. I have flagged this message as spam so many times I think Google is tired of hearing about it from me. On the plus side, at least where my e-mail is concerned, it always goes straight to the spam folder. I just thought these statistics were pretty amazing as they happened in under 6 months. I wanted to share it because it follows a real basic format that I know we all see on a regular basis so I wanted to take the opportunity and break it’s contents down and discuss them individually a bit.
But first I want to share what I found when I was poking around into Google’s suspicious or unwanted mail policies. The page states that “Gmail has an automated system which helps detect spam by identifying viruses and suspicious messages, finding patterns across messages, and learning from what Gmail users you commonly mark as spam”. The filter is generally split into six different categories, “Phishing Scams”, “Messages From An Unconfirmed Sender”, “Messages You Sent To Spam”, “Similarity To Other Suspicious Messages”, “Administrator-Set Policies”, and “Message Content Is Empty”. The information used and collected is to protect from potentially dangerous or fraudulent messages and helps to better understand and detect them in the future.
This particular e-mail and ones that are similar to it always leave me with the same basic questions. First of all when I do a Google search for “U.N/WBO/042UK/2012” every single result returned is for scam alert blogs, forums, or websites. My personal favorite is called very simply Fake Letters because it has am increasingly large number of these fake letters for the public’s reading pleasure. The website has a very simple definition of a 419 Scam which I will borrow and place here for your convenience.
“What is a 419 Scam?
The scammers usually contact you by email or letter and offer you a share in a large sum of money that they want to transfer out of their country. They may tell you about money trapped in central banks during civil wars or coups, often in countries currently in the news. Or they may tell you about massive inheritances that are difficult to access because of government restrictions or taxes in the scammer’s country.
Scammers ask you to pay money or give them your bank account details to help them transfer the money. You are then asked to pay fees, charges or taxes to help release or transfer the money out of the country through your bank. These ‘fees’ may even start out as quite small amounts. If paid, the scammer make up new fees that require payment before you can receive your ‘reward’. They will keep making up these excuses until they think they have got all the money they can out of you. You will never be sent the money that was promised.”
Now, I always hear how people hate scammers and spammers, but rarely ever hear what they do about it or with it. Personally, even though this is the first time I have actually published one of the e-mails, I do basically the same things I have mentioned, to include a Google search to see what others might be saying about it. For me personally it is a pain in the ass because the hit my blogs and I have to remove them on a regular basis. But, they are entertaining to read none the less.
Which leads me to ask all of y’all, what do you do with your spam?
As a reminder, the listed e-mail was sent to me. The two pictures were acquired through a Google picture search using the search term “spam”.
The Sting Of The Scorpion Blog (T.S.O.T.S.B.) 