Types of Spam Mail

My first experience with spam that I can distinctly remember is a letter to my dad from Australia about a large lottery he had apparently won. I was then barely ten years old, and along with my mom credited my dad with the ingenuity to have carefully chosen an Australian lottery to invest a penny in it as a quick way to get rich, without telling any of us about it. My bright and cynical older brother constantly doused our hopes until my dad returned from work and drowned them down the toilet.

Man has known spam for as long as he has known God. Probably even before scams in the name of religion began, spam did in the form of sermons. Before we get into a circular debate about religion, let us first talk about spam in general. I predict that the world will soon witness spam awareness campaigns like AIDS awareness campaigns, and with good reason.

Here are the most common types of spam we get in our mail boxes.

Forwards: …Microsoft agreed to pay $1 for every 100 people this mail reaches. Please forward to all your friends…
Chain mails are now so old that after hundreds of funny chain mails mocking other chain mails, they are slowly decreasing. We are getting used to other easier ways of sharing interesting online material through social bookmarking tools. A malware-carrying chain mail is still disruptive, and sometimes destructive, because most forwards come from close contacts.

Gifts: We are pleased to inform you that… Congratulations!!! To begin your claim processing process…
The Nigerian Scam is a synecdoche fast becoming synonymous to advance-fee fraud. A mail about you getting lucky with a large lottery, or becoming a benefactor of a big bequest, or being chosen by the President himself to channel offshore funds from a soldier back into the economy just in time for the bailout. Just in time. The catch is that you should pay the bank or the corrupt bureaucracy a small fee for the funds to be released. Quick. Perhaps this is the most-studied and most well-known spam, rather scam, and I still read about people falling prey to this every now and then. This is what made me take up this common topic.

News: Click link to watch President-elect Obama’s victory speech.
This is increasingly becoming a formidable form of spam potent enough to wreck your PC with a single click. Remember the Bush-killed-Obama spam?

Offers: Uncensored Internet Television Now Available.
Offers to enlarge equipment, offers to buy drugs without prescriptions nor taxes, offers to buy novelty goods for nickles. Weeks before Thanksgiving is when this kind of spam increases. If shopping is a woman’s sport, I wonder why there aren’t as much spam targetting women. Are they missing something? Or do they believe that men are innately more stupid? Never mind.

Personals: Find true love on Christian Dating.
These are heartfelt imaginary love letters written by mushy members of the spam industry. They have a beginning, a middle, and you get to write the end. Again, I’ve seen them being targeted on the male audience (and the lesbians). Are they secretly more lachrymose?

Phishing: Please log into your bank accout and confirm the transaction.
Phishing is often clubbed with news for better results. A day after news about troubles in Wachovia Bank broke out, I received a mail from the bank with some links and directions. I didn’t go through it, because I don’t hold an account in Wachovia, but I’m sure it had been imaginatively written persuading me to login and perhaps transfer my money to some other safer and numerologically lucky numbered account.

Porn: So do you want to see me $#*!$@?
Funny how many fall trap to the stupidest spam. Porn is allegedly the single largest category on the web and also the single largest virus carrier.

As a conventional blogger who religiously follows spam I have to write this: If you don’t bookmark or forward or share this article with at least thirteen others, your PC will automatically reboot seven times today.

It will, anyway. Keep watching this space for ways to defend yourself against spam.