Spam is so bloody obnoxious. Sadly, it's like the real thing. They keep selling it because people keep eating it. In this case, people click through and sometimes even buy things from spam.

Most spam, though, is easy to spot. You can make your what 10 feet long? And keep it that way for 100 years? And while you're at it, you can make a trillion dollars by entering this lotto for free 10 million times. And you won't mind keeping a 20 million bucks by just hold 500 million in your account for a few days. But first, you just need to send the transaction fees of 89 thousand up front. You will get your money.

These are all easy.

But for the last few months I've been getting ones that are a bit harder to spot. And, in fact, they are ones that I actually have to open. I use hotmail, with the exclusive filter on. That means I only get mail from people in my contacts. I don't have the junk mail deleted. Instead, I scan through it. I also sell things on eBay. This means I may actually get some important email about something I'm selling. The latest looked like this:

I don't know what the blocked image is -- and I don't want to know. But the link at the bottom is actually just a label for the real link. I won't click on it; I don't need more of these. Looking closely, there are inconsistancies. In addition, the item doesn't even exist. The first time I got one of these was while I was selling about 15 things. At first, I merely though eBay had screwed up -- which, being an autiomated system, has too many issues with it to even start thinking about. But then I realized the link didn't actually go to eBay.

My problem with this is that it doesn't have anything to do with what is being sold. Perhaps it goes to some site that looks like ebay and they're trying to steel passwords. More likely it's trying to fool people into clicking in to a site that'll pop up a million windows thus giving them lots of ad impressions, etc.

I just wish they'd stop because I actually have to look at them while I'm selling something and decide if it's a real one or not.

*grumble*

Posted by Shane on April 27, 2004 11:58 AM | Permalink