Saturday, April 21, 2012

Best. Spam. Ever.

And I quote via copy/paste:

Attn: This is to inform you that we the fbi have a warrant to arrest you if we dont hear from you immediately,this is the final warning you are going to receive from the fbi office do you get me? I hope youre understand how many times this message has been sent to you. We have warned you so many times and you have decided to ignore our e-mails we have been instructed to get you arrested immediately, and today if you fail to respond back to us with the payment then, we will close your bank account and jail you and all your properties will be confiscated by the fbi.Robert Mueller, III FB I Director
A few things to take note of in this email,

  • the text above comes from the subject line of the email, not the body. There was no text in the body.
  • I don't think it's being overly pedantic to suggest the actual, real Federal Bureau of Investigation would capitalize its initials.
  • I'm not an American, and I don't live in America (mind you Marc Emery wouldn't have said "yes" to either of those points either.)

I, like most people, have to check my spam box occasionally to make sure I don't miss critical (hire me!) emails.

Most of the content of my spam box is what you'd expect, "Restore you [sic] Paypal account", "IMPORTANT: Your Account Is Temporarily Deactivate [sic]" and urgent requests for me to pass on my bank account information to "friends" who need help getting their money out of the country.

This FBI one is new to me, and I love originality.

I especially like the conversationally threatening tone of the email, to wit, "this is the final warning you are going to receive from the fbi office do you get me".

The odd thing about this email is that other than expecting one to reply, there is no other specific action suggested.

Most other spam asks you to send information to them, or to click a link or buy a product.

In sales this would be the "closing the deal", the point where the sales person (associate, consultant, customer service representative, team member, account executive, business manager, management trainee or other euphemism to distract you from what the person is attempting to do to you and maybe even make that person think they're something other than an annoyance) asks you to buy the product they've been trying to pitch you on for the last three hours while you were stuck in an airless, windowless room in the sub-sub-basement with someone who isn't quite what they present themselves as.

When you say "no", an experienced, well trained sales person will ask why so they can work you through their practiced script to answer your objections and turn your "no" into "yes".

It won't really matter to them even if the "yes" is just to get them to shut up so you can get out of the airless, windowless room in the sub-sub-basement.

Well, that was a bit of a tangent. Sorry, about that.

I have certain issues my therapist hasn't entirely relieved me of. (Apparently my sentence ends are still something the therapist to get me to stop having a preposition at.)

One last thing that surprises me is that in spite of punctuation so atrocious even I recognize the errors, they have the correct current director of the FBI right down to his name suffix.

In conclusion (aren't you glad you read far enough to get to the conclusion?), this email has provided more amusement than the usual offers of Viagra, money or casual sex, and isn't that all you want from spam.


Related video (you have to know which video this would be)

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