Saturday, January 2, 2010

Funny spam

It's rare to receive spam that's frankly funny. Here's a delightful specimen that reached me a couple of days ago:

Good Day, I am Fadhil Mohammad an accountant with Turk Ekonomi Bankasi A.S in Turkey. I want to ask your attention to receive Funds on my behalf, as you co-incidentally bears the same name with my late client. The purpose of my contacting you is because I need someone who can receive it for our mutual benefits. On your response, I will send you the full details and more information about myself and the funds. Yours sincerely, Fadhil Mohammad

As you can see, I'm about to become a wealthy man for a precise reason: namely, Fadhil Mohammad's "late client" was apparently named Skyvington. What an extraordinary surprise. I was totally unaware that I had a wealthy relative in Turkey. The funniest aspect of Fadhil's email is the header, which is particularly user-friendly:

He was smart enough to send off his shit email to a list of "undisclosed recipients". Nevertheless, Fadhil doesn't seem to have a firm grip on the English language. Somebody had apparently informed him that emails of this kind fall into a category known as spam. So, to make sure that his email is recognized as belonging to the correct category, Fadhil has inserted the word SPAM, explicitly, at the head of his subject line. That way, there's no way in the world that his email might be mistaken for something that it's not intended to be.

Fadhil sounds like a nice guy, and he has given me a good laugh. So, I plan to reward him with a sizable cash bonus for kindly informing me about this money left by my late relative in Turkey. In fact, my inherent generosity and highly-developed spirit of Christian charity persuade me to let Fadhil keep the whole bloody jackpot.

CORRECTION: The joke's on me. After examining more closely the header of Fadhil's email, I realize that the term SPAM was not actually used by the author of the email. It has beeen inserted, somewhere along the line, by a diligent spam filter. That's the first time I've ever seen such a warning, which probably indicates the exceptional purity of Fadhil's production. On second thoughts, I've decided to reduce the cash bonus I intend to give him. And I've been thinking of using this windfall money from my late relative in Turkey to buy a yacht and go sailing down along the coast of Somalia.

2 comments:

  1. Eric Berne, in his book Games People Play, calls it "Let's Pull A Fast One On Joey". It's an attempt to cheat some one by offering them the chance to get in on something crooked. That was a crude example. Bernie Madoff made a career out of playing that game!

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  2. Watch out for more pirates off the coast of Somalia Bill

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