Dear Spammers, October 19, 2006 zuzu No, I don’t want any phentermine. Or tramadol. Or valium. Or viagra. Or valium pictures. Or liquid valium. Really. It’s okay. You can stop now. Love, Zuzu.
Or stock tips, or job offers, or expensive software for cheap, or watches, or anything else that you might be trying to sell me.
Does the spam ever work? Like, once, did someone buy soft cialis on the internet? Did someone else open up a bank account in Kenya? Some guy bought stock on an inside tip? A woman in Memphis broke the chain and the next day lost her job?
What about deposed Nigerian princes looking for bank account numbers, so they can get their money into the US?
I deleted 36 comments in moderation this morning. All spam. Then I spend an hour deleting all the trackback spam. I hate spammers.
Mikey S, apparently people do buy the stocks. I’ve not done this for myself, but I was told that if you track stocks that are mentioned in these spam “tips,” they do in fact fluctuate in ways consistent with the email tips. So, if you’re a spammer and you do it right, you’re basically printing money.
Don’t you guys have some sort of automated spam catcher? Akismet works really well, you know. No manual intervention needed. To answer the questions raised in comments: yes, spam has a “success rate,” even if its only around 0.01%. But when sending out millions of e-mails is a cheap, automated process, that’s not a bad return on investment. Phishing, actually, is a much more lucrative activity—its success rate is about 5%.
Don’t be surprised when this post becomes a magnet for spam because of all the drug names in the subject. It seems that spam keywords attract spam. I’d suggest shutting off comments here in a week or so. Also, I recommend upgrading from WordPress 1.5 to 2.0.4. The version of Spam Karma 2.something that is included by default is much better than what you may have downloaded when WordPress 1.5 was the current release. Yea, it’s a big job to switch over but my spam management workload has dropped to almost nothing. Maybe not for you as I only get about 50-100 spams a day. I only have about 2 a month get through Spam Karma and actually post on the blog. The stock spam scam is called “pump and dump”. The idea is that you only need to generate a bit of buzz to get a few people to buy a low value, thinly traded stock. If demand goes up on something lightly traded, the price can double or more. Then the scammer dumps his shares on the open market. Profit. Don’t take stock tips from spam.
I have tramadol. My dog takes it. Liquid valium sounds divine. Shaken into a martini . . . (I do know someone who bought ativan, valium, and xanax from a spam email. It worked. Stuff showed up from Buenos Aires, I think.)
i had liquid valium via I.V. during an operation for which I was conscious — so to speak. What should have been a grueling experience was won’erful as i told the nurse all about my lovely childhood…..and when i asked sloggily, “Oh, when is the doctor going to start?” the reply was, “He’s just finishing up honey.” Nothing else has that power I swear. I need a car loan, a low interest mortgage, have relatives with missing bank accounts, waiting for me to claim them (with someone’s kind offer to place them in my bank account) and of course, although I’m a woman, I need a bigger penis and I have a plethora of mysterious women wanting to meet me who think I’m quite the stud. In the old days, people use to be hounded by door to door salesman, I see this as less innocuous.
Further to Standard Mischief, I would say I don’t take stock tips from people whose only possible motivation can be to make money from me. Zuzu, how about Cialis?
I installed the Akismet plugin on my wordpress blog and have not had one spam comment or trackback since. It also stops the pointless spam like this stuff: zkzjzjizjijizizijzi zijzijzjijizjiziijdaosfdooiasdoifjsdaio ojdofijaso oidsjf Also, using a proxy server can increase privacy, although I’m not sure that’s the source of the problem you are having. There seems to be a clear distinction between anonymity over the internet, which can be achieved very easily despite naysayers, and people exploiting personal information obtained through various other methods. The party in question seems to be a bit obsessed, not litigious, which is perhaps all the more troublesome.