What is going on with spam?

What on earth is happening in my inbox nowadays, first of all how did these people get my yahoo email address? I don’t post it anywhere, only a select few people have it, so how did all these lawyers representing wealthy people who died and want me to have their money suddenly get hold of the email address of little’ol me?

And I know I shouldn’t really laugh so hard at their feeble attempts to prise my details out of me or buy their ‘medications’ to enlarge certain areas of my anatomy, I know people really do fall for this stuff, but how exactly?

If I get an email to my yahoo address saying someone needs help smuggling in millions of dollars and if I could just contact them and give them my bank account details then they will wire it over and I can keep some of it for the inconvenience, at no point does it even register on my reality-meter. How could it?

How could anyone think that some lawyer for a big rich client who died or whatever crap they spout, just happened to get YOUR email address and without even knowing your name thinks you are the perfect person to handle this sensitive transaction…? Come on people!

Or how about winning the Spanish lottery? That one is brilliant, how can you win the lottery when a) you haven’t purchased a ticket and b) you don’t live in Spain? I know Del Boy won the Spanish lottery and yes if you were over there then you could probably buy a ticket, but I have never been to Spain and if I did go the last thing on my mind would be buying a lottery ticket. So how on earth could you have won??

I guess if they send it to millions of people they will get both Spanish people and people who have just returned from Spain, so yes they could scratch their head and wonder if they bought a lottery ticket, but how on earth did you handing over some Euro’s in a Spanish shop translate to them having your email address… think for a second before you start chasing those meeeeeelions of dollars!

Or what about those people who spam me with my email address in the ‘from’ field? Nice one, I am going to open that one right up and click any link you give me – NOT.

Yet I can’t help but feel it is good that all this spam is so laughable, imagine if they actually put some effort in and made believable stuff…? You do get the odd phishing email which uses all the right logos etc of a bank asking you to enter your details, those are nasty ones, but thankfully the large corporations take a dim view of some spamming… person impersonating them and scamming their customers, so they are far less common.

Alright, I have run out of steam on this rant, I’m off to see what joy my spam filter caught for me today