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spam

Anghela’s friend Galina

My regular readers might remember the scam mail series with “Anghela” with funny automatic translation, which I received in German and tried to reproduce in English, somewhat simulating the bad language – but Anghela isn’t alone. And this long mail, too, which tries just as well to grift travel money from overcredulous recipients or use them for money laundering, went to many mailboxes, with a few variations and different mail addreses – here the German antispam forum thread, and an example of another German commenting it.


Hello!!!!!!!!

As Terry Pratchett put it, Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign of a diseased mind. In this case, diseasedly criminal, it seems. „about my letter please be not astonished! I saw your account on the web page of the acquaintances. This web page is called “FreundScout24” or “Meetic”.“ Now where? Can’t remember that? Diseased mind, hm?

„You have the registration there?“ I thought you saw me there – so why the question?

„I want that you understand me. I will strive to [German] write properly.“ Then why don’t you try harder in this mail? The first impression is often important! I think that you man with whom I are I can happy be. I think that you should your school fee you get back: „You understand mine [German]? I studied [German] in the school and the college.“
:klugscheisser:

„I upset am when I write this letter for you.“ And I’m upset when I receive spam. Well, at least you can laugh at spam like yours… I will very very attend your reply. Oh, you too? Anghela was eager about that too.

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Links of the Week (2008/07)

Short and sweet:

Honest spam and unnecessary questions

Earlier today, a spam mail which slipped through my filter honestly announced its dishonest intentions already in the subject line:

New job! fishy

:lol:

The main text then was just a “Ciao”, a link and badly translated prose. (And there have been are other variations with other words, of course. Most got filtered out correctly, though.)

And a comment spam disguised as questions asked yesterday, among other things:

On what a cursor operates this forum works?

I’ll be so kind and answer this question: Mostly, it’s probably one like this one arrow cursor, and this hand cursor and that text cursor are quite common, too – but basically, it doesn’t matter. :P

Spam quiz

Yesterday I received three spam mails that raise two kinds of questions. First, they consisted of only four (or five) words each, which seem to be riddles with this (my) question:

Which word doesn’t fit?

1) Sword Nail Knife Baby

2) Bank Bowl Electricity Bed

3) Highway Sphere Grapes Leather jacket

Show (my) solutions ▼

Second, you wonder what they want to accomplish with such short mails with the short subjects Knife, Tunnel and Map and also like the strangely mixed up ones from recently containing the same in MS Word HTML) without sensible contents – a test for their spam software’s random generator??

A yellow pages site is begging for backlinks

Well, they’d give some in return, unlike a elsewhere a few months ago (German). Quote from the mail (my translation):

“You receive this e-mail because you have been registered in our yellow pages site web2.cylex.de for some time now.

…but not voluntarily…

We’d like to offer you one or two backlinks as long as you set one of the following link to us:

<a href=”http://web2.cylex.de”>Branchenbuch</a>
<a href=”http://www.cylex-telefonbuch.de”>Telefonbuch</a>
<a href=”http://www.cylex-review.com”>Firmenbewertung</a>

[…]
The address of your homepage is already stored in your file, however the link is currently not treated as such by search engines (masked with Javascript). If a link exchange is accomplished, the link will be demasked by us and considered a real backlink by the search engines.
[…]

If you don’t want to receive further e-mails from us, please open the page […] to unsubscribe.

I never wanted e-mails from them, because I have never been in this yellow pages site which apparently is filled automatically from who knows what sources.

Thank you for your attention,

Your IKM Team

IKM Internet Kaufmarkt GmbH
[…]”

Since even if there are loads of useful entries in this cylex yellow pages site (ignoring a readability with needs for improvement thanks to USAGE OF CAPITAL LETTERS in some places), I’m sure that there must be numerous useless ones, too, because:

  • 2005, I was listed with an old private address that had been invalid for years, mixed up with phone number and description from some company.
    :dunce:
  • Late 2006 (I wrote about it here), they offered a free route description for the entry that this is about now, too: the private site of my Abitur class (German kind of university-entrance diploma) (rmg91.de), entered as company “RMG 91 CHARAKTERISTIK” with my current private address (without my name).
    :lol2:
    For “keywords, field of company’s activity”, their bot didn’t find anything more, so they just repeated the assumed company name.

Update: You’ve got to hand it to them that they reacted to my mail within less than 45 minutes and removed this entry. :applaus: