I received an email that said if I sent by mail a dollar for each of six people that were on a list in said email (with adress & all, I had to mail them the bills inside non-transparent letter) & them sent 250 email addresses to a certain email I would receive US$ 50,000.00.
And then it went on giving instructions on how to do so and saying “hey, I know this is hard to believe, but I believed and I got the money, think of it, you’ll give 6 dollars and will gain fifty-thousands! You only have one chance so do it now!”
Heh, I wasn’t surprised when some people 'round the world fell for that “I’m an african runaway and need to deposit 1 mil in your account”, I wouldn’t be if someone fell for the free patriot cursors, and not even people falling for the “4 DVD’s for four bucks”. But if someone actually mailed money and emails to these guys, I’ll lose my faith in humanity.
What’s worse… suppose you are the kind of net user that doesn’t give your email so easily, in such a way you think they’ll never be able to spam you… If you have a dumb friend who would fall for something like this – even if they didn’t request money – you may be sure your email will be in the list he’s assembling to get the fifty thousands.
edit: that’s my first spam in three weeks, so I suppose that’s exactly what happened. I’m trying to list my dumb friends in my mind to see who are the most probable responsibles.
Originally posted by Ren you may be sure your email will be in the list he’s assembling to get the fifty thousands.
Unfortunately, when one enters an email address when one signs up for Hotmail, ICQ and the like, undoubtedly that email appears on lists of some sort. Subsequently, lists exchange emails regularly, thus causing the address to appear on an ever-increasing number of lists.
There is, and will always be, a couple of people that will believe evrything they are told in an email: As long as it seems remotely probable anyway. By remotely I mean very remotely.
All three of my e-mail accounts are spam infested. It drives me crazy. At least I just figured out how to stop those annoying Messenger Service spyware pop-ups! AOL is good for something.
Originally posted by BahamutXero All three of my e-mail accounts are spam infested. It drives me crazy. At least I just figured out how to stop those annoying Messenger Service spyware pop-ups! AOL is good for something.
Originally posted by Valkyrie Esker This is why I’m glad I don’t seem to get any spam whatsoever. Those things seem so damn stupid!
Ever since I adjusted my junk mail filter, not a single piece of spam has breached it. In fact, I think they have simply given up! Just the trouble I once had, deleting dozens of spam messages each week… Who are they kidding? Only someone really stupid would take that lame bait. Spammers should be heavily fined. It’s disgusting to see how many companies resort to it for advertisement purposes…
Originally posted by Manus Dei Ever since I adjusted my junk mail filter, not a single piece of spam has breached it. In fact, I think they have simply given up! Just the trouble I once had, deleting dozens of spam messages each week… Who are they kidding? Only someone really stupid would take that lame bait. Spammers should be heavily fined. It’s disgusting to see how many companies resort to it for advertisement purposes…
Meh, I don’t like filters, they make me miss stuff. For all I know, they might accidentally siphon off an important e-mail, so I just keep close watch on what comes into my mailbox.
Exclusive mode is all I need. If the sender isn’t on the list, off to the junk mail folder with it. Only a few people send me pertinent e-mails anyway.
I seem to recall they did a survey and about 1% of people actually respond or buy what they see in their email, so you do the math, $6, 250,000 emails that’s $15,000 right there.
Also not giving out your e-mail doesn’t help that much, there are bots wose only objective is to spam random combinations of characters on a given email server until they get a hit and since many e-mail servers try to facilitate delivery by forwarding invalid e-mail addresses to a very close match you can get far more hits than you would imagine.
On one server my address is evds, for me to get an email all there needs to be are 2 or 3 valid characters, so as long as its 4 characters long and at least 2 characters match it’ll get to me, its a real pain, especially since most of it is porn, and they have a new system that masks the sender address to make outlook think the receiver is actually the sender so you can’t block it without blocking your own email address.
This is why I’m glad I don’t seem to get any spam whatsoever. Those things seem so damn stupid!