I know spammers are stupid...

[agsteele]

I've been musing over a continuously successful series of spam messages which reach my mailbox of late. The content all looks the same but either offers what I think is home loans or various body enhancing drugs.

I say THINK because, as you'll see from the example, the content is almost impossible to decipher without significant effort.

So, putting ourselves in the place of the spammer (or shall we say advertiser) my question is: What do these folks imagine the average recipient is going to do with a message like this?

De z ar Home Ow k ne o r , 
  
Your c v redi w t doesn't matter to us ! If you O z WN real e q st n at
n e 
and want IM b ME b DIA x TE ca g sh to sp k en h d ANY way you like, or
simply wish 
to LO t WER your monthly p e aym k ents by a third or more, here are the
deal a s 
we have T p ODA h Y : 
  
$ 48 j 8 , 000 at a 3 h , 67% fi a xed - rat q e 
$ 3 e 72 , 000 at a 3 , 9 o 0% v r ariab j le - ra n te 
$ 4 m 92 , 000 at a 3 , p 21% inte g res c t - only 
$ 2 m 48 , 000 at a 3 r , 36% f v ixed - rat y e 
$ 1 h 98 , 000 at a 3 , j 55% variabl t e - rat k e 
  
Hur u ry, when these dea o Is are gone, they are gone !
  
Don't worry about app y ro s val, your cr q edi y t will not d q isqua k
lify you ! 
  
Vi x si u t our s e ite <http://geocities.com/HerafsaPriceFar/> 
  
Sincerely, Jaci Coffey 
  
Ap u prova i l Manager

I admire the effort to circumvent the spam Assassin filters but I'd be curious to know how many loan enquiries they are receiving as a result

Andrew

[Wazoo]

It looks to me that perhaps you have your e-mail client configured to not display the invisible GIF instruction set that comes with each one of these contest entries. The last one I got ... geeze it's been so long, I mught have some of the details wrong ... it was something like .. print this out on a TI-99/4A compatible printer, using the Lucinda Sans-Serif with nocturnal ectensions (proprietary) font ... place the resulting page under the decoding grid (available for free from the contest site, just a $24.95 shipping & handling fee) ... and if you collect 387 of these contest entries that show the magic word G U L

L I B L E .....

You Win !!!!!!!!

[agsteele]

Actually, on closer inspection, the multi-part message has an HTML section where all the extraneous charcaters are magically hidden. So I guess they rely on the fact that the majority of recipients use Outlook or Outlook Express so they get to read this junk without effort.

Presumably nobody wise enough to stick with a mail client that isn't interested in HTML based Emails is that worth troubling over.

I do still wonder what the income for a typical spammer actually is. I know they much rely on a small percentage of responses of a very large quantity of outgoing messages but I wonder if there is any hard evidence of their actual turnover.

Andrew