Leaving out the fact that there is no reason password, date of birth, occupation, and country information should be required for verifying the use of an email account, why would Google's Gmail team use a Yahoo email address?
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Monday, June 22, 2009
I Get Email (Scams)
The thing about email scams is they tend to be really bad. The major problems that usually crop up are atrocious spelling and grammar, and internal inconsistencies. If you are taking the time to design and send a scam, I would think it would make sense to put just a little bit of editing effort into the matter. Of course, even if the spelling and grammar are entirely correct and the content is actually consistent with itself, you still have to hope the recipients are gullible enough to relinquish whatever information you are trying to steal from them. The reason I bring this up is because I got a scam email yesterday that actually made me chuckle. While the spelling and grammar were surprisingly good for a scam email (some minor punctuation errors like a missing space here and some random capitalization, but compared to the usual spam crap it was fairly good), they still fell into the inconsistency trap by telling me that I have 24 hours to respond before my account is deleted, and later that I have two weeks to 'update' my account before it is deleted. What made me laugh, though, was the sent-from and reply-to email addresses (you might have to click on the picture to see it large enough to read).
Leaving out the fact that there is no reason password, date of birth, occupation, and country information should be required for verifying the use of an email account, why would Google's Gmail team use a Yahoo email address?
Leaving out the fact that there is no reason password, date of birth, occupation, and country information should be required for verifying the use of an email account, why would Google's Gmail team use a Yahoo email address?
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4 comments:
I think this is actually a pretty good scam. For someone with no knowledge of how companies handle email accounts, and what they might responsibly do, I think this would make some sense to some people. This is better than most I get.
Yes, the yahoo email account is funny.
I really like this one. They went to a reasonable amount of trouble to make it sound 'legitimate' and yet they couldn't even bother to make a gmail account to send it from. Highly amusing, I have to say.
In case you're not familiar with this classic story of love, hate and ebay, I highly recommend checking it out:
http://www.zug.com/pranks/powerbook/
The p-p-power pc. It's about someone who scammed the scammer, and it's just a funny read. Once you've had your fun, you can go over to Youtube and watch what is perhaps the greatest revenge ever extracted upon scammers:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IQqd17p9_0
Assaf, I hadn't actually seen either of those before. I did quite enjoy the story of the p-p-p-power book.
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