[78-L] Just curious.. ^

[David Lennick]

My point was that the SAME wording was used in the e-mail I received yesterday 
as was in the very first ones I got on opening my e-mail account in 1990. There 
have been variations, but I find it fascinating that the same form letter is 
still being perpetrated. Obviously I also win lotteries (3 this morning, I 
think) and receive invitations to enlarge certain body parts..virtually all of 
this is trapped by a very efficient spam filter, except for the odd one such as 
the one I cited last night. Kind of nice to find a consistency in a very 
inconsistent world.

dl

Steve Thornton wrote:
> Experts on these scams estimate that at any given moment there is always at
> least one person sitting in a London hotel lobby with a suitcase full of
> cash waiting for their Nigerian scammer to show up. Some people --
> reasonable, intelligent people with successful careers and families -- have
> been lured all the way to Nigeria.
> 
> This scam is hundreds of years old; it's essentially the same as the
> "Spanish Prisoner" scam that purported to have a line on Sir Francis Drake's
> fortune. People suckered in by that one continued to believe that their
> money was due and coming soon long after the scammer was imprisoned.
> 
> Today, it's popularly called "Nigerian" even though none of the participants
> may be from Nigeria. As for the spam itself, you should realize that 99% of
> the all email is spam. Any variations you notice in the amount of spam that
> shows up in your inbox is due only to the endless cat-and-mouse game that
> spammers and spam filter writers play. It bears no relation to the total
> amount of spam, which is ever-increasing. You are getting many thousands of
> spams a day that you never see. 
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: 78-l-bounces at klickitat.78online.com 
>> [mailto:78-l-bounces at klickitat.78online.com] On Behalf Of Michael Biel
>> Sent: Monday, September 14, 2009 12:01 PM
>> To: 78-L Mail List
>> Subject: Re: [78-L] Just curious.. ^
>>
>>>> Don't they get tired of playing this game? Hasn't
>>>> anybody ever noticed that it doesn't work?  dl 
>> From: Jeff Lichtman <jeff at swazoo.com>
>>> Actually, it does work well enough for the scammers to make
>>> money at it. It costs almost nothing to send an e-mail to
>>> millions of people.  If only a few people take the bait,
>>> they'll turn a profit. If they find someone suffering
>>> from dementia they can make a lot. - Jeff Lichtman
>> Remember that they were doing this when it cost them money to send out
>> snail mail letters prior to the development of email.  Back 
>> in the 70s I
>> sent a letter to Nigerian Radio for a verification and in addition to
>> that I got several letters with nice stamps on them, neatly 
>> individually
>> typed, with the same type of scams being pulled today. It got to the
>> point where the radio guidebooks mentioned that sending letters to
>> Nigeria would result in these letters.  
>>
>> Mike Biel  mbiel at mbiel.com  
>>
>>
>>