Spammers: Thieves AND Morons!

Is it just my imagination, or has spam greatly increased lately? I browse my junk mail folder periodically to make sure it hasn’t grabbed an email that wasn’t junk (and I have to give Windows Vista credit, they have become really good at filtering out the junk). There were 417 in the last 24 hours!) Got one today from “james adams” (don’t these jerks know how to use caps?) with the subject line “Dear Sir/Madam I AM Mr. Pedro Lopez” (ah, they found the caps lock for a brief period!) It was one of those Nigerian scam deals where they have a large sum of money for me yadda yadda. This one was someone with money in the Bank of Scotland in an account in Madrid, Spain. Only the email where they wanted me to write Mr. Lopez was at rediffmail.com (which is India…bet they have a lot of Pedro Lopezes there!), and the return address was from web.de (Germany, another place with lots of Hispanics, right?)

The rest of the spam was pretty mundane stuff, thankfully not so much adult-oriented spam as I used to see (for this I thank SpamAssassin and Avast for pre-scanning email. The stuff I get is what got PAST the spam filters already in place. I’m not so naive as to think the spammers got tired of sending adult trash email. But if I see 400 a day, there must be twice that or more coming in.

This makes me wonder about the general state of the world around me. This garbage must be at least marginally effective in hooking suckers to buy whatever they are selling, or they wouldn’t be wasting their time and my bandwidth sending it. To think that there are that many idiots on the other end of the spam trail who are dumb enough to believe what they receive from total strangers is just sad!