Tuesday, August 24, 2004

Nid the cheepast mads on wab?

Some people must be just abysmally dumb - or way too trusting, which amounts to the same thing. Consider this recent spam (its Subject line provided the title of this entry):

"Hi and welcome to our phaarmecy!
One of the things we offer to you, as a selected costomer, is a big variety,
combined with good prjces.
All the medjcatjons you need with cheep prjcees !
We got all original brands and geneeric:
vjagra, cjaljs, lavjtra, xanaax, valioom and a lot more!
slight gatlinburg amaa ouffa delimit grown
commemorate distribution element marks milwaukee assemble mare puritanic sanderson."

Seventeen spelling mistakes, four grammatical mistakes, and two nonsense words, in a message only 64 words long. Sometimes, just the names of the alleged senders are enough to know that it's spam. How about:

"Wrathfully D. Accesses"
"Principals E. Overcompensated"
"Aery P. Marathon"

Who believes all this? No sane person would respond to this crap by saying "Gee, that sounds like a trustworthy, reliable company, I'll send them my credit card number right away!" but clearly there are many people out there who fail my definition of sanity. These poor (and getting poorer) people either have really badly calibrated bullshit-detectors, or else they get so distracted by the alleged savings that no other message gets through.

Folks, please: get your bullshit-detectors recalibrated. It doesn't cost a whole lot, and in fact the savings you make will more than cover the investment of a few milliseconds of thinking per day. You'd be doing us all a favour, not just yourselves: The spammers would stop tomorrow morning, if they stopped earning money. Whatever else they might be, they aren't stupid.

1 Comments:

Blogger Gaya said...

Dumb = too trusting. Hm... you still think so?

August 29, 2008 at 9:48:00 a.m. GMT+2  

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