I get unbelievable junk mail every day. Such stuff that I can’t figure out who is the more foolish: the person who sent it hoping to steal my money, or the people who fall for it, not noticing the many things wrong with it. For example (I received this in an email today):
This also reflects a brand new style in junk email, by the way. Table / row-and-column layouts in colors. (Whoopy. Somebody discovered 1980’s technology.)
First, of course, it’s in Portuguese. There is absolutely no reason to send me anything in Portuguese. That I even recognize it as such is a rarity, at least among North Americans.
2nd (see item “1” in the image) the return address is a Russian URL, you can tell by the “.ru” ending on it. Or the stated return address. (In this case, that actually is the URL, but in 99% of these cases where it says it’s going to send you and where it does are unrelated.) Russian URLs are very dangerous things to prowl around in. A significant percentage of the Global Internet Mafia or World-Wide Brotherhood of Internet Scammers and Rip-Off Idiots work out of such URLs.
3rd (item “2” in the image) the “EMPRESSA” entry (company, in Portuguese) sure seems like a nonsense entry, doesn’t it? Unless I don’t know what EMPRESSA means, of course. Which I didn’t until I looked it up.
4th (item ‘3″ above) these are all nonsense entries. Just random keystrokes.
5th, those random keystrokes strongly suggest they were not typed on a Portuguese keyboard (special characters and such), but a standard ANSI keyboard (American, that is to say).
So: Portuguese text, with some “break through” English, Russian URL, ANSI keyboard.
Huh?
6th, the only meaningful item here was my email address (blacked out, it’s irrelevant to the discussion). And that was correct probably only because it was inserted by the mailer software instead of by the Thief(1)!
Scarcely a professional piece of work, is it? (Or maybe it is! We’ll get to that later.)
Back to my opening observation: who’s the more foolish here? The Thief for thinking this could possibly fool any one ever? Or the Mark who actually clicks on it, maybe just to see what the scam is, thereby entering into the scam? For that is part of the problem, too. Maybe you are not expected to believe it; all they really need you to do is click on it, just once…
Or am I the foolish one? I find all this behavior stupid (literally), degrading both to sender and receiver, unethical, uncalled for, unjustifiable in any form, wasteful of limited public resources, about as low a criminal activity as be conceived of, and in general, altogether reprehensible. But maybe I’m missing something. Maybe I’m the foolish one…
Maybe I’m expecting, even demanding something the Human Race is just incapable of embracing.
Naw! That’s too easy a justification!!
Like the new Matrix movie says (more or less, quoting from memory)
“… Choice is an illusion. You already know what you have to do.”
You know what you have to do.
You know what’s right and what’s not. Just do it!!
Another thought: how much of the Internet’s capacity is used up every moment by garbage like this? When did criminals(2) inherit the right to waste the resources that were supposed to elevate Humanity?
Do we need to wonder why the Great Galactic Federation hasn’t invited Earthlings to join? (Or at least hasn’t invited Earth Humans to join; maybe Dolphins and Elephants are already members, being both smart and sane, where Humans are very clever but whose mainstream culture has no ethical compass — dangerous.)
“Q” the Omnipotent (as he never lets anyone forget) acting as Judge Q, [Star Trek Next Generation] putting the whole of Humanity on trial as “a dangerous, savage, child race.” I don’t think we’d have much in the way of a defense if such a trial were to come up today. Do you? Am I missing something?
That was the “fourth book of the Hitchhiker’s trilogy” [that’s not a typo] by Douglas Adams. He eventually had six books in his “increasingly misnamed trilogy.” Much of what he had to say is spot on, very pointed sarcasm.
Alright, alright, alright… Here’s a possible “rational” explanation for this email. It is SUPPOSED to look amateurish. That makes it seem “safer” to some. Others will not notice the mistakes, and they’re the primary marks, anyway.
Here’s my guess. It might even be correct. Some teenager (by emotional age, if not by calendar years) in an unknown location on the planet, purchased a scam email template and mailing list on the Dark Internet, filled it it out in a lazy hurry, and is sending out these emails in the hopes of making fabulous riches. There are many things that might happen next, but I’d give it a 50-50 chance that clicking on that link would bring up one of those “you have viruses! Don’t turn off your computer! Call this number now!” things that you can’t get out of short of turning off the computer (which is why these messages say not to turn it off, ’cause then the problem goes away and they don’t get your money) and they’ll be very helpful, and very nice, and tell you, yeah, yeah, you got scammed by that nasty email, we just need your credit card number and we can fix it, when in fact this is the scam. They sent the email, or that teenager sent it and is getting a piece of the action. If you start to get suspicious they turn from nice to nasty, and start threatening you. “You won’t be able to use your computer at all if you hang up now!” and things like that. Some of them won’t ask for your credit card, but will insist on a money order or cash-card of some sort, something you can’t call your bank and have reversed.
Never, ever, EVER click on any link or call any phone number that suddenly pops up on your “device” this way. Apple, Windows, Android, iOS, ChromeOS, Linux… doesn’t matter. NEVER. (This sample popup is equally unclever, by the way: This obviously popped up on an Apple device, yet the link is “windowsdesk.net”. Duh! Safari doesn’t run on Windows. But you’d have to know that, wouldn’t you? That’s a big part of what the thieves and terrorists depend on; your ignorance in these matters. Degrading, isn’t it? Then the statement “might have been detected” is logically meaningless. That is, it says nothing. Was it detected or not? Might have been… a very clear indicator that nothing at all happened. A stone might have fallen off the Great Pyramid. Mars might have been inhabited by Penguins, once. Might have been… There’s a reason why cops get to thinking all criminals are stupid.)
However, in as much as the above “rational explanation” is a far scarier scenario than “they’re simply stupid,” I really hope that in fact they are “just stupid.” <Sigh>
Fake email, fake virus, fake tech support. You lose. Massive Criminal Class made possible by what the Internet’s inventers thought would be the key to the Humanity’s enlightenment. Irony.
Never click on these things.
In the meantime, let me send you an email… it’s perfectly OK.
Trust me — Confie em mim!(3) — Поверьте мне
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(1) I say “thief” though I have only this email as evidence, plus the knowledge that an unholy percentage of the Human Race now works in the Criminal Classes, via the internet. When your mark is in one country, your bank account is in another, your web server is in a third and you are in a 4th, there isn’t a whole lot any one police force can do. So unsuspecting people all over the world get their limited resources stolen from them, and we all get to have Internet capacity clogged with this stuff for no better reason than because it’s possible.
(2) “Criminals” includes, by the way, those Corporations who also choose to operate without an ethical center. They too waste your internet capacity, your money and even their own profits in degrading and insulting garbage advertising, nearly as destructive as the above email was intended to be, even hoped to be.
(3) I probably shouldn’t explain that one, but I will. It’s “trust in me” in Portuguese and then in Russian (which I do speak a little of — very little), at least as rendered by Google Translate, which is far from 100% accurate. (Very far.) So if that really isn’t trust me, it’s as close as most Internet thieves and cyber-terrorists will get in their emails and “candy, little girl” come-ons, anyway.