Current Status

This blog is not frequently updated because most case-by-case scam reports are now listed in subordinate blogs. At this point in time, most of my efforts are targeted at documenting employment scams in the Suckers Wanted blog.

2005-08-31

Meta: Lottery Scams Taken Elsewhere

I get a lot of lottery scam spam and 419s, but I've been neglecting them lately due to the fact that they are so common, but require a fair bit of fiddling to document. I do want to make archived copies available to those who search for them, however, so I've come up with a more efficient approach. I've started a secondary blog called Lottery Scam Du Jour, and all my lottery scam spam just gets dumped there without further comment. If I really want to comment about a particular spam, I'll add a comment to the post, but in general I'll just provide the text without further comment. The only thing missing will be the source IP address: blog entry dates will reflect the time of arrival.

If this process works for me, I may do the same for 419s and Stock Spam.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Have you any idea why most scam e-mails contain obvious spelling or grammatical errors? Is it because the authors are not educated native English speakers? Or is it because they are just dumb?

Spotter said...

The majority of lottery scam and 419 scams (where the sender wants to give you a cut of a multi-million dollar stash) originate in Nigeria or nearby countries. Some Nigerians operate out of Spain, England, and the Netherlands. Many phishing emails (where the sender claims to be your bank) originate out of eastern Europe, particularly the former Soviet Union. In most cases the poor grammar and spelling is thus attributable to English as a second language. In some instances, however, it will be part of an attempt to avoid spam filters.