Lately my inbox suddenly saw the increase of various "You won 10 Mil. bucks and a WINDOWS PHONE!!1" e-mails that beg me to go stupid and fill out my bank account details for totally legitimate purposes. I also received a lot of friend invitations on steam all of which asked me with a lightning-speed response upon adding them that their friend(s) are unable to add me and to fix this I have to go to a link with "steamzommunity" or whatever else in it.

Now, I'm not new to the concept of the "Nigerian Prince" thing, but even if you're out fishing you have to at least make the bait look like something convincing to hook onto. I almost died laughing looking at this mess, even the "Nokia Rep's Special Message" one looked more professional. Do they think it looks like something apple would send to me, or that I'm really that stupid? (And no, I'm not opening that on windows.)

I like his Outlook e-mail address.
Looks legit to me.

Nah, If you throw it enough times, you will catch a fish by hitting it with the hook.

I replied to these a few times to see if they would respond - I've never gotten one... :(

For every account I have to create I also create a new email address (I have 126 email addresses). This way I know what idiot doesn't know to protect my info. It's an almost perfect solution... In the years I used this "technique" I only had spam on my email address associated with PayPal and from what I understood those idiots at PayPal shares my email address with the store I buy from, so I had no idea who's the idiot who didn't knew to protect this piece of data.

You should see some of the shit I get as an innkeeper. :P

Honestly I think a lot of these people are just doing it so they can see if they can get away with it. I'm always hearing about scammers trying to work over people that don't have any money so there has to be something there that goes beyond financial gain, like just knowing you got something over on someone.

Rest assured right now there is someone out there trying to come up with a way to scam you out of your copy of Teen Agent. :D

Oh Joy Sex Toy bookmark

Just remember for every million people who don’t fall for it, there’s at least one that does. And they’re probably in my family.

Yeah that reminds me, tell your Uncle that there are NO REFUNDS! That bridge is now his.

I remember receiving email from South Africa, the person there just received a 1 Mio in US dollars but my assistance was needed to get the money out from some African bank. All I needed to do is to fill in some document and send it by fax over the counter for a 50% share. Which I did, and you know what? I can literally shit money ;))))

Yeah. Some of these things are true. I had seen on youtube a message from a ghost claiming that if I didn't copy and repost it 50 times then within the next five minutes my house would burn down with me inside. So I copied and reposted it 50 times, and, indeed, nothing happened. Maybe it was just a coincidence, but since then I take these posts seriously.

I know it seems ridiculous, but there's a method to the madness. A lot of the rather unconvincing scam mails floating around are deliberately unconvincing. The thing is that scamming too many people is sure to draw unwanted attention, and when scamming people, it helps to deliberately target, well, the most stupid segment of the population, not to put too fine a point on it. So lots of scam mails are deliberately badly made, as a kind of intelligence filter, making sure that the only ones to take the bait are the ones least likely to cause problems for the scammers.

There's also the "problem-> remedy" approach. They send out stupid emails, some containing their virus in it upon opening because they can, then they get you by contacting you to have the virus removed for the low low price of $500. It works because randsomware is technically not illegal, and encrypting your own shit behind a paywall is genius. Except that most people don't fall for it, and few that do an didn't mean to can work around the problem themselves.

There is more to it. Once a friend of mine resent me a letter of happiness with threatening text which obliged me to send it over to other recipients or else my friendship could perish. So I wrote to my friend how much I hate those stupid people who tends to send such mails over. And guess what, my friend asked me to go f@ck myself and our paths now separated. So it really works. I learned my lesson, - don't mess with the mighty power of scammers' mails!
My favorite was to pay to remove adware from internet browser for a silly plugin which can be easily turned off and uninstalled.

Or the phone calls from "Microsoft" about my poor beleaguered PC that they've been monitoring.
I ask them if they know that secretly monitoring people is against the law, and also if they ever heard of Linux.
They tend to hang up before I get into my diatribe about having to wear a Tin! Foil! Hat! all the time so that the evil Microsoft can't monitor my thoughts as well, and how they're the secret masters of the world in secret co-operation with slimy, tentacled aliens from the other dimensions.

XD