I got a 419 scam email the other day. It was the usual sort of thing - a businessman from the Shell Petroleum Development Company (in Nigeria, unsurprisingly) had left $6 million to Random Person On The Internet. Naturally I was intrigued by the offer and emailed back asking him to provide more details, so that hopefully I could wind him up a bit.
He's just replied with proof of his identity. I can just about let past his thinking that MS Painted text looked remotely convincing if the JPG was compressed enough. You might even be able to forgive him for pasting it so badly on to the machine-readable part at the bottom. But to go on a random image search and decide that HIS face best represents you, then proudly affix it to your false passport... it takes something truly special.
I wonder how they would react if you sent a reply to this effect.
"Stop trying to scam me you dirty bastard, now fuck off and stop filling my inbox with crap, thank you."
I got one a while ago asking about sending me some money, i find it insulting they think i'm going to fall for such a poor trick.
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Pete Nattress Cheesy Bits img src/uploads/sccheesegif
Registered 23/09/2002
Points 4811
9th December, 2005 at 12:01:46 -
People do fall for them though. Mainly bored, stupid desk jockey Americans who long for a bit of adventure. They get an email and they don't rationalise (perhaps because they can't), hand over their bank account details for the transfer and bam, conned. If it didn't work, the con artists wouldn't bother. That's why we're all still getting spammed to hell, that's why viruses spread so rapidly. People are idiots.
Have you guys also gotten those idiotic emails that say that if you don't send it to 16 other people on your MSN buddies list you're gonna have to pay for MSN in the future. I 've gotten like hundreds of them. I can't believe all my friends are so fucking stupid they still fall for that trick. And why the hell would MSN charge for the use of their IM. That would just kill the thing, and everybody would switch over to AIM or ICQ or whatever. And a official mass message from MSN's staff would have all sorts of banners and formatted text in it. The ones I get are just plain text, and some of them even contain bad language and stuff. People are idiots, truly.
Meh, I've had chain e-mails about a handicapped girl that gets 0.001 dollar for every sent e-mail, and one about a 15-year old dead girl that'll kill me in my sleep if I didn't send it to 10 other people within an hour.
If anything, the spam isnt that annoying, its the freaken chain e-mails X_Sheep mentioned, that my friends, out of all people, send me just because they are bored, or perhaps they think its cool. God, those things are so annoying.
X_Sheep: I had that one, and I'm dead now. Have you gotten the one that says 'A little boy has cancer and he cannot pay for his operation. Everytime someone sends this e-mail, he will get a dollar for his operation. If not he will die.
How retarded can you get? I sent back an e-mail saying 'Good, let em' die.' And they wrote back saying I was heartless and that it was true. Somehow, I'm not convinced.
Fine Garbage since 2003.
CURRENT PROJECT:
-Paying off a massive amount of debt in college loans.
-Working in television.
I think the major detail these people are missing in these stupid chains, is the fact that its nearly impossible, atleast from what I recall, for the original sender, to track how many times his e-mail was forwarded, unless they put alot of work into it. The only problem is, there are so many idiots out there who believe this stuff, because they have absolutly no clue how computers or the internet work, and fall for these stupid e-mails. They dont think logically, if at all. Thats why so many inexperenced computer users, dislike Windows. Its to easy to screw up if you dont know what your doing.
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