one born every minute

[freckles_and_doubt]

Spam is the new coat lint: the irritating kipple clinging to your garments, that you spot, classify and brush away without thinking about it. It's become background noise to e-mail, so routine that I don't even think about the analysis I do, reflexively, on each message as it pops into my inbox. It's been months since I've had to do a search to double-check for scam warnings with any of the reputable sites, because mostly I reject them, as most of you probably do, either on the subject line or halfway through the first sentence. This auto-destruct is based primarily on their grammar and expression and only secondarily on their actual content and positioning. The scams may change, but the level of illiteracy remains somewhere around your ankles, in the mud.

I haven't yet had to endure spam on my phone, bar the occasionally quickly-deleted marketing screed from some company where I actually have an account of some sort, until this morning, when an SMS message cheerily announced that I'd won something! The re-contextualisation is the sneaky part, with the small but real possiblity that I won't transfer the paranoid skillset from email to the new medium; hell, if Cory Doctorow can be caught out, balloon, cape and goggles notwithstanding, I certainly can. It's the more likely because legitimate cellphone companies actually do run promotions of various sorts; the chance that you'd score money via a text message is small, but it's greater by several magnitudes than the likelihood that you'd win via email.

This one didn't even touch sides: my laser-pointed search-and-destroy grammar-analysis reflex kicked it out with the first word. Different medium, same sad, illiterate phishers.

Congratulations!! Your no. Was among the lucky winners on the NOKIA 2010 YEARLY PROMO. You won, R150,000. Ref no. 0155P. Call +27719451302. For Your Cash Prize.

Fail on the following counts:

1. "Congratulations" as the opening word. This is sheer marketing, designed to trigger wish-fulfilment, and hence to pull you in and make you read from the first word. A genuine win notification letter doesn't need to honeytrap you, it'll probably congratulate you but there's likely to be a lot more legalese involved and a far less frantically effusive tone.
   
2. Multiple exclamation points. Sure sign, as Terry Pratchett sagely observes, of a diseased mind, quite apart from the informal register.
   
3. "Number" abbreviated as "no." If this were a legitimate promotion win notification - well, it probably wouldn't be by SMS, but if it were it would be by bulk SMS from a computer, not typed on a phone with predictive text, and if it were from Nokia they wouldn't be worried about length and cost. Also, a formal notification would require a more formal register and legalese. This is a habitual informal phone-user scammer slipping into familiar habits without thinking about how they position the typer.
   
4. Capitalisation of "Was" after the abbreviation full stop. Auto-function on most phone text editors, here simply not corrected. Hurry/lack of concern for grammar do not say "official communication."
   
5. Capitalisation of NOKIA 2010 YEARLY PROMO. Self-important, attempting to be catchy, too Nigerian for words.
   
6. Random, incorrect comma after "won". Sheer illiteracy. Corporal Carrot Commas are only cute in Corporal Carrot.
   
7. The win amount: R150 000 is simply too large to be realistic for any competition via cellphone. Mostly the legit ones seem to be small sums, airtime, etc. Again, this is trying to elicit greed and thus prompt the revelation of personal details and account numbers which is presumably the point of this. The phrase "Cash prize" towards the end of the message has the same purpose - "cash" is a trigger word.
   
8. Minor props on the reference number, it's the only bit that so far sounds halfway authentic, although in a competition of any size it would probably have to be longer and more complex.
   
9. Random full stop in the middle of a sentence, before "For your cash prize." Actually, this says non-native English speaker to me, it's not a classic first-language error.
   
10. The scam is detailed, with much of the above content, on the MTN page, which means it's not only lame, it's old and busted.

Whatever happened to the classic cons and stings of yesteryear? the ones that entailed actually studying your victim, learning the idiom, working to construct a tone and approach that provide a reasonable facsimile of the real thing? The truth, of course, is that I'm not the market for this. The market for this is three fold: (1) people who are not familiar with internet culture and memes and who mistake the text medium for authority; (2) people who are really desperately poor and are grasping at straws; and (c) people who are as illiterate as the scammers.

Comments

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

Old, busted scams are the most prevalent, since they're easiest for stupid scammers to find.

Volume

[bumpycat.livejournal.com]

The big difference is that a few minutes work can now target thousands or even millions of people. You can use rubbish scams because there's bound to be someone gullible or desperate in that many people. If your few minutes work is targeted at one person, like the scams of yesteryear, it has to be good.

It should be the Crowley Principle, from Good Omens: why waste time thoroughly corrupting one person when you can instead just nark off tens of thousands?

Re: Volume

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Yes, of course, volume is where it's at (although I agree with Rumint that it can't be particularly cost-effective with SMSes); it just amazes me that they can't up their chances even slightly by marginally improving the content of the scam. It can't be that hard to find one semi-literate spammer? Weirds me out.

Re: Volume

[egadfly.livejournal.com]

I've wondered about this too. Does the process of learning to write competent English somehow build in an aversion to spam-type crime? Does attention to detail preclude such crude antics? Are there better criminal opportunities for the properly literate? Do they all become lawyers?

[dicedcaret.livejournal.com]

I wonder how they get our damn cellphone numbers to start with. Data protection, huh? Yeah right.

(Also: I got excited at your first sentence. I thought I'd just spotted my first new-fangled Internet colon in the wild! My understanding of grammar is zilch, but I suspect the opening 6 words do not a dependent clause make.)

I was scratching my head wondering what might work at the moment. Something along the lines of "Dear Winner, you have been selected to help us celebrate the launch of Twilight : Eclipse at a special Twilight Fanfest. To claim your VIP ticket, please call 0800ECLIPSE or visit eclipse-themovie.com/fanfest and enter the prize code I<3EDWARD". Your phone would probably suffer a terrible fate, but I bet a lot of people would go for it :>

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Nope, that first phrase before the colon is a sentence in its own right, verb and everything, although I have to admit Oscar Wilde would never have said that "spam is the new coat lint". I loved that article, although I have to say the dependent-clause colon is not new to the internet, it's old hat to pretentious academics, to whom a colon in a paper title is a social necessity. The pattern is "Interesting metaphorical phrase or punchy quote fragment: Noun and/or Punning Adjective-Noun Compound in the Adjectival Literary Genre Works of Literary Writer." See a whole bunch of examples on the programme page (http://www.gla.ac.uk/faculties/arts/graduateschool/events/anti-tales/programme/) for this conference I'm attending. The Internets stole it from us, honest.

In other news, please don't take to crime, you write horribly plausible spam.

[rumint.livejournal.com]

I'm always a bit puzzled by SMS spam, as the non-zero cost of each message would seem to make it at least an order of magnitude less profitable than email spam. So I can see them targeting specific high-value systems like SMS banking systems, but random spam makes very little sense...

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Yup, it really doesn't. The whole point of spam is that the outlay is minimal, and with SMSes it really isn't. But thinking about how umbilically attached all my students are to their texting, more or less continuously, perhaps the economies of scale work because the market is so huge and unthinking?

[tngr-spacecadet.livejournal.com]

I make a point of reporting all SMS spam to WASPA. It costs nothing and ensures you get removed from whatever list you're on.