Arrant Nonsense

Just got this:

Dear Friend

Message from Saudi Arabia Prince Alwaleed bin Talal for his charity donation and You have been selected as recipient/benefactor for $25 Million Dollars from Alwaleed Philanthropic Foundation Grant. Contact me for more information.

Regards
Mr Ahmad Sadiq Azizi

This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the named individual(s). If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately by email and delete the message from your system. It is unlawful to disclose, copy, distribute or take any action on the contents.

(bolding mine)

Well. I have copied it to my clipboard, distributed and disclosed it to LJ, Twitter, and Facebook, and taken action by doing so. Also, there are no "named individuals."

Come at me. Please. Dumbasses.

One was from a market I really want to crack: they want to hold a story I adore for possible inclusion in the magazine. At this point, they say, about 1 in 20 stories make it from here. I've had a few get this far, but never actually made it in. Hopefully this one is the charm. More news as events warrant.

The other thing was not "wonderful" so much as "irritating," but the wonderful part comes from the addendum at the bottom. I will reproduce the entire thing for your amusement. Bolding mine.

Hey,

I was wondering if you generate any business from your website?
I know exactly how to accomplish that using SEO to drive targeted traffic back to your site.
If your interested in discussing, just reply back.
Thanks,

Zach
Contact:
sittering@sina.com

-------------------------------------------------

This e-mail message and its attachments (if any) are intended solely for the use of the addressee(s) hereof. In addition, this message and the attachments (if any) may contain information that is confidential, privileged and exempt from disclosure under applicable law. If you are not the intended recipient of this message, you are prohibited from reading,
disclosing, reproducing, distributing, disseminating or otherwise using this transmission. Delivery of this message to any person other than the intended recipient is not intended to waive any right or privilege. If you have received this message in error, please promptly notify the sender and immediately delete this message from your system.

pls send address to breakermuy@sohu.com for removal.

Dude, screw you. I'm pretty sure that "applicable law" is completely meaningless to spammers like you, because otherwise you wouldn't be breaking it by sending me unsolicited commercial mail for my LJ account. Therefore, your "confidential" email is reproduced here, in all its spammy, misspelled glory, for my flist, my Tweeps, and my FB friends to laugh at. Not only that, but if you actually read my LJ, your very first question there would be answered in the (mostly) negative--and you would already know how I feel about spammers. Hell, I have a tag.

Not only that, but if I'm not the intended recipient, then how would I know that without reading your stupid spam first? But apparently if I'm not the intended recipient, I'm not permitted to read the damned thing at all? Do you people even listen to yourselves? Oh, yes, I'm surely going to notify the sender and whoever that is at the bottom that this is a live email address so they can spam me more! That's a peachy idea! How about I create a bunch of dummy accounts and spam you with them with BUY MY BOOK?

Also, learn the friggin' difference between "your" and "you're." At least then I won't have something else to point and laugh at you about.

Woke up to this in my inbox this morning:

Dear user,

Your account has been compromised Click here [where here is a link to some site I'm pretty sure I've never visited] to verify your account.

Thank you.

Service Team.

No indication of who it's from. No indication that they actually know who I am. Just... "dear user." And, yes, the period was missing after "compromised"--that's a direct copy/paste.

Lame.

In other news, I woke up to a rejection in my inbox this morning and now I get to wait on markets to open up for that one because long story is long. So that's awesome.

Got this today:

Eviction Notification,

Be advised that you must exit the occupied premises
until March 08, 2014 or be forcibly removed!
Any resistance will be met with strict legal sanctions
or forcible removal of your family from your home.
Find a copy of the vacate notice in the attachment to this notification.

Court representative,
Alexander Weiss

Why, yes! I'll just open that not-at-all suspicious .zip file in this totally-legal-looking email that's not even addressed to me by name right away! You have frightened me just that much!

Protip to scammers: Exclamation points and misuse of words ("until March 8"? Really?) are a clue to everyone that your email isn't legit. Also, my house is paid for and my taxes are not overdue, and eviction notices are sent via snail mail, not email.

I mean, there's no legal firm logo or any language in this thing that would convince a deficient puppy that it was actually valid. It's like they're not even trying.

Fail.

Someone named "Eve Pearce" spammed contacted me today out of the blue to see if I wanted her to provide me some "content" for my LJ--at no cost! (bolding hers) Right. Because I'd want to pay someone else to put things here? Why? This is my personal blog. I write my own damn content.

Not only that, she's "working on behalf of one of her business clients," whom she would link to in her articles "in a related and subtle manner." Wait, what? Seems to me that if I'm providing the platform for their ads, then shouldn't they be paying me? Especially since this is an account I pay for.

So, basically, she wants to use my LJ to advertise her stuff and not pay me--and she thinks she can fool me into thinking she's doing me a favor. Wow.

Nice work if you can get it. Dude, get your own LJ and put your own content on it. You don't even have to get a paid account, and that way I'm not waking up to something like this in my inbox.

According to my spam, I "can be the Alpha Male!"

*unzips pants, has a look, feels around just to be sure* No. No, I really really can't.

See, this is why I click on the Nigerian emails that seem to flood my inbox about three times a week.

Particularly, the bank where the diseased had an account valued at [12.5million dollars] has issued me a notice to provide the next of kin or have the account confiscated within the next fourteen official working days.

I'm sure he means "deceased" there...

Points for originality in this one, though. Apparently "Eng. Adams" died, along with his family, in a train wreck in Japan, rather than a plane crash.

So, I checked my spam folder, as I do about once a week, before deleting everything in it. And I got something from "EPPIcard," with the subject line "Unsuccessful password reset."

Understand, I have no idea what an EPPIcard even is. But I opened the email anyway, because phishing emails are usually pretty entertaining.

This one was no exception.

Account status: Suspended
Service status: Freezed

This security notice is to advise you that a unsucsesfull Password Reset was recently attempted on your account.
If you are unaware of these changes, please restore your EPPICard account right now using using the folowing link :
[fake link deleted]
Thank you for using EPPICard

"Freezed."

But apparently the fact that I've been blogging about the BearFic again means that I'm back on the bear radar. Yes, because no one who is writing about bears in HER blog might be talking about Ursus spelaeus.

In other news, we went and saw "Expelled" yesterday. Yes, that "Expelled," with Ben Stein. I'll probably do a reaction post to it later on.

We all get penis spam, right? Whether we have one or not, whether we like them or not. I probably dump two or three a day (yes, that's all--Yahoo's spam filter has gotten much better of late).

However, this is the first time I've gotten one titled ( not remotely safe for work, but you can probably work it out by what follows )

I just looked it up, because I'm odd that way. (Of course, I was laughing before I looked it up, but I wanted the inevitable LJ post about this to be accurate.) An elephant's penis can be up to six and a half feet in length.

How would a human use such a thing? Pants would be a problem. He'd need a wheelbarrow to cart it around. I've actually seen pictures of this (elephantiasis photos in my Parasites class in college), and it ain't pretty. Women would run screaming in the other direction. It wouldn't fit, even if you could get a woman to lie still long enough to try.

Seriously, spammers, if you want to sell me penis-enhancers (even though I don't own one myself; that whole "two shall become one flesh" only goes so far), making me go into a mad fit of giggles is probably not the way to do it.