Tag: Email

What Have I Done to Deserve This?

I do get some weird and not so wonderful spam emails. We all do. It goes with the territory, I guess. Many are littered with schoolboy errors – sloppy punctuation, terrible grammar and lazy formatting. And some also promise riches only a fool would refuse/are too good to be true (delete according to level of gullibility) like this one…

Mrs. Maria Elisabeth Schaeffler, a German business magnate,Investor and philanthropist. I am one of the owners of  Schaeffler Group . 25 percent of my personal wealth is spent on charity. And I also promised to give the rest of 25% away to individuals this year 2025. I have decided to donate 4,800,000.00Euros to you.

If only I’d known about this before our trip to expensive Gay Paree. A few extra Euros stuffed into my bum bag would have come in very handy.

The thing is, Maria Elisabeth Schaeffler really is a German business magnate. I wonder if the good lady knows about all this funny business going down in her name?

And then, as if things couldn’t get any weirder or less wonderful, this fake news dropped into my spam folder…

Really? Do I look like a bible belt trumpeteer or a redneck devotee of that other total fruit loop, the malodorous Musk? What have I done to deserve this?

That leads to a very tenuous link to the Pet Boys’ 1987 hit with the late, much-lamented Dusty Springfield. I was a huge fan of them both back in the day.

Well done to the Boys for giving Mary O’Brien one last crack of the whip.

Right on Target, Right on Price

It’s well known that these little islands have some of the toughest gun laws this side of the Milky Way. It’s possible to legally own a gun but for very specific reasons only – down on the farm, for example. There’s pretty much universal consensus in support of strict gun control. People don’t want to see nutters and ne’er-do-wells wandering around their local supermarket with semi-automatic weapons. As a result, gun-crime is mercifully negligible. But this doesn’t stop lazy spammers targeting me with this:

I realise the message was auto-generated from a dodgy mailing list with my name on it – there’s no actual person thinking “I wonder if Jack fancies some bargain bucket bullets today?” What really alarms me is that, if I did keep an illicit pistol under my pillow, I could massacre 50 people for the princely sum of just 21 pence a shot. Frightening.

Spoof and Spam

I remember the days when spoof meant imitate for a laugh and spam was cheap tinned meat of dubious nutritional value popular with students. Now I’m plagued with spoof and spam telling me my PayPal and Amazon accounts have been suspended and warnings of dire consequences. The latest wheeze comes from fake couriers with their ‘pay up or else’ mantra. It’s easy to be taken in. Many of the emails look genuine enough, professionally written and with all the right branding. But some fraudsters are just a little bit thick and couldn’t pull the wool over a trained monkey. Take this one (allegedly) from the Royal Mail, a UK company.

Here’s a clue: on this side of the pond ‘center’ is spelt ‘centre’. Likewise it’s theatre and metre (unless it’s a device for measuring usage). I know some non-Brits don’t get it but there it is. So listen up ‘Royal Mail’ – supposedly of Tucson Arizona of all unlikely places – 0 out of 10 for effort. Must try harder (as my final school report said).

Is That a Gun in Your Pocket…?

Let’s face it, if you’re plugged into the modern world your privacy will get compromised all over the place. It doesn’t seem to matter what privacy settings you tick on Faceache, the Tweety thing, Instapout or those endlessly annoying cookie notices, your personal information will leak like a rotting condom and sold on to the highest bidder. I’ve got used to the tedious online ads for stuff I’ve already bought, pointless cold calls from India, threatening emails from crooks, futile come-ons from ladies of the night, blah, blah, blah. But then this popped into my mailbox.

Is this for real?

It’s bad enough some trigger happy redneck is selling dodgy gun licences without the boring bits getting in the way like proper training or checks, but the failure to spell ‘amendment’ correctly is just criminal. Tut! Tut!

Cops and Robbers

The deluge of GDPR emails has finally dried up, thank the Lord. For the uninitiated, GDPR stands for the General Data Protection Regulation 2018. It’s the latest wheeze from the European Union intended to strengthen the law about the collection, privacy, security and retention of personal data. The new rules are fairly straightforward, if a little OTT – like so much that comes out of Brussels. I’m all for protecting the little person from the exploitation of corporate bigwigs but I can’t help thinking the reputable will comply, the disreputable won’t bother and those squeezed in the middle will be bewildered – think brown owl trying to chivvy up the girl guides or some poor sod juggling the mailing list of a local am-dram society. I doubt it will stop nuisance calls from India or spam emails from God knows where. A case in point was the mailshot that recently dropped into my inbox from a US company. They were trying to flog me such must-have products as a concealed ankle holster perfect for a sneaky armed robbery, a decorative bracelet knife because Saturday night’s alright for fighting and a magnetised holder for the loaded pistol I keep under the sink next to the Fairy Liquid (that’s a joke, obviously). Every trailer should have one. Did I subscribe to this crap? Nope. Did I unsubscribe straightaway? Yep. Will it make the slightest bit of difference? Not a chance.

If you like to see my own half-cocked GDPR kinda-compliant privacy thingy, you can see it here. Happy reading.