Spam spam spam spammity spam

[gothwalk]

Sometimes, I really can't work out what spammers are after. A list I'm on was vigourously bombarded - about 50 copies got through before an admin got on the case - with a listing of reg codes for Microsoft stuff, up to and including a beta build of Longhorn. I can see why someone might send a single copy, but not 50. And there's no benefit in sight.

And there's a very well written one in this morning to Swiftpay from "Elizabeth Richson", saying that she writes for a website, has linked to us, and would we be interested in linking back to her? Apparently she found us by searching for a given search term, which is one that you'd reasonably find Swiftpay on. If it wasn't for the slightly klunky line of "My site is all about Finance - Misc too", I wouldn't even have glanced at the headers. But it turns out to be from a non-existent domain, and in something mildly mindboggling, googling for that name gives a total of two results, neither connected in any way to finance sites. So a mail asking for a link to a site which doesn't seem to exist, from an email address that can't be replied to, which was generated by a clever program tripped up only by the fact that the category the site is listed under didn't fit as a natural language noun. Why? How can anyone possibly profit by sending this?

Comments

[trinityc.livejournal.com]

Very strange. I had one to my work address this morning, claiming that 'my site' www.archives.org.uk came up 12th on Google for "sheep skin cleaning", and that her site deals with "Auto - Parts / Accessories" too. I was just preparing a gentle email explaining that it's not my site, my name's just on there because I'm one of the training officers for the Society of Archivists, and we probably come up on that search because some of the documents we deal with are written on parchment which is treated sheepskin...then I thought I'd check her out, discovered several links on Google including this one, and here I am!

Is this the most irrelevant example of this email?! Car accessories...archives...hmmmm! It's common for people not to know what we do, but the spambots have clearly been utterly baffled by this one! I've been falling about laughing all morning...

Re:

[gothwalk.livejournal.com]

My best theory so far is that it's a test of a viral marketing robot or script. It's evidently working pretty well, too.

[trinityc.livejournal.com]

It does sound like it...it's certainly different! *is still highly amused by it all*