Florid Spam

Friday, January 12th, 2024 12:33 am
flwyd: (spam lite)
This afternoon I received two email messages from gmail.com accounts which I suspect are some kind of phishing campaign. But while I'm used to seeing spam with a kind of "horny eastern European from a dating site" vibe, the language in these is remarkably florid and high brow. Perhaps using fancy phrasing like this is a ploy to avoid spam filters: it worked; both arrived atop my own gmail inbox.
From: Valeria Leonard <bransifritik4>
Subject: Zephyrs of Yearning. Embrace their whisper?

Hi, Trevor

I found your bio and noticed your appreciation for the simple delights of life. I have your zeal for gardening, reading, and wildlife well-being. Your compassion and hobbies align so closely with mine, and I‘d adore to connect, exchange stories, or potentially even give tips for designing a booming garden. How do you reckon?

Eager to connecting,
Valeria
A booming garden, you say? Perhaps it's exploding with color.
From: Jessy Morton <jameshbernardlucash>
Subject: Verifying a few items from our conversation.

Greetings, Trevor.
Tales envelop mine domain; I‘ve dug up those in my line of work and construct tales personally. Have you ever sensed connected to a narrative‘s resonance? Which part characterizes your essence?

I didn't connect to this narrative's resonance; it is poorly dressed word salad.

Update: I got another surreal email a few days later:
From: jessie Moon <ianschmittlinocr>
Subject: Looking into trending tech. Seen anything impressive?

Dear,
Trevor

Always, I‘ve forever felt that truly if we are to deeply understand the world, it‘s imperative to should envelop it via each of our sensory perception. Positioned as someone who designs journeys crafted for our inner being, I often indulge in the undeniable enchantment of things like aromas, feels, & also reverberating tones. Have you once been so immersed within an instant wherein moments felt to merely halt completely? What‘s could be the sensation that never fails to catapults you instantly to that time to an treasured time?
Eagerly anticipating for your insights.
Best,
jessie
Well, this sensation definitely failed to catapult me instantly to any other time.
flwyd: (spam lite)
I enjoyed the over-the-top absurdity of this spam message I received through my website. Unsurprisingly, the referenced Bitcoin address has never received a transaction.
Your reputation and business are at stake!

We on your behalf in the message your website address trevorstone.org and your contact information (including in social. Networks and messengers) will send:

+ on 15,897,318 sites, threats with insults to site owners, US residents, Europeans, LGBT and BLM.

+ 790,000 messages to bloggers with threats and insults

+ 2 367 896 public figures and politicians (from the USA and Europe) with threats and insults

+ 70,000 negative reviews about you and your website trevorstone.org

+ 23 467 849 contact forms of sites with threats and insults

+ 150,000 emails messages to people with disabilities with threats and insults, many of them will definitely sue you

+ 57000 emails of messages to veterans with threats and insults, FOR THIS YOU WILL BE EXACTLY SITTED

Following from all of the above, you will get a lot of losses:

+ an abuse from spam house, amazon and many webmasters (for spam, insults and threats) will come to your site trevorstone.org, as a result, your domain will be banned and blacklisted

+ people will sue you because you threatened and humiliated them

+ in court you will not prove anything, everything will look as if you did it all, MOST YOU WILL GO TO PRISON

+ internet will be inundated with negative reviews about you and your website trevorstone.org

+ threats and reprisals from BLM and LGBT community members, in fact, these are dangerous community guys

Total: you will lose your business, all your money, you will spend on lawyers and compensation for court decisions, you will go to jail, your life will turn to hell ...

We already have everything ready to launch all of the above, but we decided to give you a chance to avoid all this, you can buy off a small amount of money.

Make a payment, transfer 0.39 Bitcoins to this address

1JDYfBMP3vg8TcuFuwSHc1Wop3rREqupC4

We are waiting for the transfer from you until November 27, on Saturday November 28, if payment does not come from you, we will begin to destroy your business and you along with it.
flwyd: (spam lite)
Having the GMail address trevorstone@, I get a lot of email destined for other people around the world named Trevor Stone. This misdirected mail can be anything from invoices from contractors to airline ticket confirmations to Uber Eats receipts to messages from family members. But most of it is marketing mail from websites, and most of them seem to be meant for a Trevor Stone from England who is particularly bad at putting typing his correct address.

I noticed an email for this United Kingdom version of Trevor Stone which illustrates an interesting pattern: the internationalization of the consumerism parts of Thanksgiving weekend, even though the "Spend Thursday feasting and visiting with your family" part seems to remain an American-only tradition.

Date: Thursday 26 Nov 2020 15:38:28 +0000
From: Millwall FC
Subject: An early Black Friday offer has been spotted!

Enjoy an early Black Friday offer - get free postage and packaging (UK ONLY) when you spend £60 or more, using the code below...

This UK-only Black Friday special has an extra dose of irony because the Millwall FC's mascot is The Lions, but they're not the Lions football team most associated with Thanksgiving football.

Direct Marketing Fail

Thursday, April 5th, 2018 11:46 pm
flwyd: (spam lite)
Today I received a glossy mailing from a real estate agent addressed to the folks who sold us their house a month ago. The flyer starts "Selling a home in East Boulder requires extensive local knowledge, a great marketing plan, and superior negotiation skills." It then lists several houses currently for sale or under contract. Finally it lists five recently sold houses… including the one we just bought.
flwyd: (step to the moon be careful)


Dear Manager,

(If you are not the person who is in charge of this, please forward this to your CEO,Thanks)

This email is from China domain name registration center, which mainly deal with the domain name registration and dispute internationally in China.
We received an application from Huatong Ltd on November 4, 2013. They want to register " trevorstone " as their Internet Keyword and " trevorstone .cn "、" trevorstone .com.cn " 、" trevorstone .net.cn "、" trevorstone .org.cn " domain names etc.., they are in China domain names. But after checking it, we find " trevorstone " conflicts with your company. In order to deal with this matter better, so we send you email and confirm whether this company is your distributor or business partner in China or not?

Best Regards,

Jim
General Manager
Shanghai Office (Head Office)
Nah, [livejournal.com profile] mollybzz was my distributor in China.

(Interestingly enough, this was sent to two email addresses which can be found on trevorstone.org, but not the address associated with the DNS record. I'm also amused by their inconsistent use of the halfwidth-width comma.)
flwyd: (Vigelandsparken thinking head)
I got some Viagra spam with the subject "Throb of consciousness; but they cannot go with us, th" and some difficult to follow spiritual cruft. That seemed like an interesting phrase, and Google's got about 400 hits for "throb of consciousness. They all seem to be of a florid mystic bent, with Hindu/Yogic, Buddhist, and Judaeo-Christian variants and even a quote by Nietzsche. This spiritual connotation seems a bit odd to me, because "throb of consciousness" is a perfect description of the headache I had this morning when I didn't want to get out of bed, but decided I needed to roust myself and make a doctor's appointment.

"The beginning and end of the world-process, from the first throb of consciousness to its final leap into nothingness, with the task of our generation settled for it ; all drawn from that clever fount of inspiration, the Unconscious, and glittering in Apocalyptic light, imitating an honest seriousness to the life, as if it were a serious philosophy and not a huge joke, such a system shows its creator to be one of the first philosophical parodists of all time." -- Friedrich Nietzsche
flwyd: (spam lite)
Having closed my web browser with all the distracting tabs, I randomly decided to check my potententialspam folder. After I tossed out everything with the words viagra, pfizer, sale, or watch, I found several recent important messages hiding in the haystack. Examining the headers, I discovered that 3.2 (of a required 5) points were given for FH_DATE_PAST_20XX: The date is grossly in the future. I remember all the hubbub about Y2K bugs, but I'd never heard of a Y2.01K bug. Fortunately, sudo sa-update && sudo /etc/init.d/spamassassin restart did the trick... at least for another ten years. Apparently being a lazy sysadmin of your own server has its downsides…

Important upshot: If you've sent me email and wondered why I haven't responded, let me know! Send me another email, leave a comment here, ping trevorstone (a) gmail.com, etc.
flwyd: (step to the moon be careful)
Acai (more properly açai) products, generally targeted at health or weight loss, have been a hot spam item in the last year or two. One slipped through SpamAssassin today with a link to www.permanent-honorable-fruit.cn. Fitting that such a domain is in China, because "perfect honorable fruit" sounds exactly like the sort of phrase that's beautiful and insightful in Chinese and completely befuddling in English.

Intrigued, I looked up[1] the Chinese translation for each word. One possibility is héng zūnguì guǒ:
恒 - héng permanent / constant
尊贵 - zūnguì - respected / respectable / honorable (from zūn - respect, revere, venerate; honor and guì - expensive, costly, valuable)
果 - guǒ - fruit / result (guǒ is the character used in "fruit juice," "fruit tree," and several fruit names)

But then I noticed another option for fruit:
实 - shí - real / true / honest / really / solid / fruit / seed
shí is also the pronunciation of my family name, 石 - Stone (and the number 10 and lots of other things). It amuses me that shíshí can be 实石, "fruit stone." As [livejournal.com profile] mollybzz and I worked out one day, "Trevorberries are peaches. Fuzzy on the outside, sweet on the inside, and with a stone in the middle."

[1] Mad props to MDBG Chinese-English Dictionary. Without that fine website, I'd get absolutely nowhere on Chinese.
flwyd: (spam lite)
With a subject like "tofu saguaro" I had to click on it. It looks like spam's back to the regular diet of word salad. But this one forgot to try to sell something.

X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.5 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,DATE_IN_FUTURE_48_96
Received: from
14787242259459626.17830963414472005.17376013275189631.15081552752992091
(HELO localhost.localdomain)
(15566010135653747.19372736151740526.19899217534355936.19924525057640338) by
19814466866607399.11931504065116649.19120223147707883.13080905548820478
with SMTP; Tue, 29 Jul 2008 23:05:23 +0800
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2008 23:05:23 +0800
X-Mailer: MIME::Lite 3.01 (F2.72; A1.62; B3.01; Q3.01)
X-Header-CompanyDBUserName: hpccm
X-Header-MasterId: 203808
X-Header-Versions: Hewlett-Packard.1t0bn8nd8.fk@us.newsgram.hp.com
X-FID: 41E89DBC-6543-60AF-B1E3-93CDEA41DCB7
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
To: <resume@mydomain.invalid>
From: "Clarence Hayes" <ToddwatercoursePerry@forged.invalid>
Subject: tofu saguaro

competitor elmer crosstalk

moldboard competitor kaufman? crosstalk, yelp camelopard.
incapacitate rout foxhall moldboard stinkpot id, naked
sharpen podge elmer yelp vet.

decorous sharpen.

More Great Spam

Thursday, July 24th, 2008 10:10 pm
flwyd: (spam lite)
With this kind of amusement factor, I'm only mildly annoyed that SpamAssassin missed it. It sounds like an Onion headline, but the only hits from Google are other people who got the spam.

X-Spam-Status: No, score=1.8 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_50,HTML_MESSAGE,
HTML_TAG_BALANCE_BODY,MIME_HTML_ONLY,RCVD_IN_BL_SPAMCOP_NET
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2008 18:08:24 -0400
From: Karpeles <grau2007@forged.invalid>
User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 (Windows/20080421)
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: nffkcq@mydomain.invalid
Subject: Polar Bear Finds Yoga Great For Flexibility, But Murder On The Balls
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Aliens Abducted By Michael Jackson <spam URL>

Best Spam Subject Evar

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 02:43 pm
flwyd: (spam lite)
There's been a recent flood of spam with fake news headlines like "Long Lost JFK Heir Found" and "Miss Universe Assassinated on Airplane." I just got the following:

X-Spam-Status: No, score=3.6 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_50,
        RCVD_IN_BL_SPAMCOP_NET,RCVD_IN_SORBS_DUL autolearn=no version=3.1.9
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:14:27 -0400
From: Pasha <gleeen@forged.invalid>
User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 (Windows/20080421)
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: esume@trevorstone.invalid
Subject: Bush Averts Albanian Uprising By Invading Alabama
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Bush Calls Blacks Lazy, Stupid <spam URL removed>
flwyd: (spam lite)
I got the following spam this afternoon.

From: "Tech Support" <service@hvr4s.com>
To: <jgm@mydomain> (an address that must be randomly generated)
Subject: Reverting with the information you asked for.

Recipe for great BBQ Sauce:

INGREDIENTS
1 quart apple cider vinegar
1 (20 ounce) bottle ketchup
1/4 cup paprika
1 pound dark brown sugar
1/4 cup salt
1 tablespoon black pepper
2 tablespoons red pepper flakes
1 tablespoon garlic powder
1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce
1/2 cup lemon juice

DIRECTIONS
In a large container, mix together the apple cider vinegar, ketchup,
paprika, brown sugar, salt, pepper, red pepper flakes, garlic powder,
Worcestershire sauce and lemon juice. Pour into an empty vinegar bottle,
ketchup bottle or other container and store in the refrigerator for up to
1 month.


Unless they've got lots of Worcestershire stock to move when everyone decides this is the best BBQ sauce EVAR, I don't see the purpose of this spam. hvr4s.com is registered with an address in Quebec. A google search for the domain turns up only another LiveJournal post for a message from the same address but with notable quotes.

That recipe would be better with bacon.

Smart In Bed Games

Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 06:29 pm
flwyd: (bad decision dinosaur)
I got several spams today with the subject "Smart in bed games." I don't know what the 0.6KB zip attachment contains, but I started wondering what games would be more fun with an "in bed" suffix.

Word games are obvious choices because they can be played with the lights out. If you sleep in a weird bed like I do (hammock), a board game would be challenging, but in a standard bed it might be an interesting precursor to pillow talk. And, of course, WoW addicts could play in bed and be labeled complete losers.

What game would you most like to play in bed? What game would be the most challenging there?

Edit 3/26/2008: A water bed would be the ideal place for naval miniature wargames.
flwyd: (spam lite)
Someone tell Ayn Rand about my spam. As are A.
flwyd: (spam lite)
I got home from China and discovered that I have a social life.
So this weekend is a well-deserved bout of loafing about.

Some interesting spam subjects:
Be portuguese
Spam:Of an graduate
Gay Cops
do u need 7" LongPenis? Please use this to archive v0t93j2whw4xgk
There are many enjoyable uses of a penis, but I don't use mine for archiving.
Hot Pornstar Katsumi threesome analsex and cumshot argyrosis
In dentistry, argyrosis is A pathologic bluish-black pigmentation in a tissue resulting from the deposition of an insoluble albuminate of silver.
adult xxx porn movies on demand physics
Physics, on demand! Why don't many people sell that? Oh yeah... gravity is always on. And it's a free service!
Innocent teen posing naughty autoregulation
Viewing the pictures will provide an example of autoregulation of arousal states...
03 | Hairy brunette vintage babe sucks and gets doggy slammed hard orthostyle
There are sexual positions deserving of a technical name beginning with ortho-, but I don't think doggy style counts.
I also got a whole bunch of crap in Japanese for BEL*AIR MAX to an email address that was used for forged spamming a few months ago. I edited my email configuration to block all mail to NitaerodibleMoreland@ my domain.
flwyd: (spam lite)
I'm half tempted to click on all the "Please verify you're not a spammer by clicking here" links I just got with forged addresses at my domain. "Your anti-unsolicited-email program is contributing to the problem of unsolicited email. I'll make it work worse so you switch to something that doesn't fight potted meat with potted meat."

I also really don't care when people in Switzerland will be back in the office. But I suspect they didn't want to learn where to buy a good watch, either.
flwyd: (Shakespeare bust oval)
I just got a spam with subject "To be or not to be. To be..." It was just an image for online pharmacy (nounforest.com under other circumstances sounds like a delightful place).

I need to go to bed, so your challenge is to amuse me (and your fellow readers) with comments of Shakespearean spam: Twist the Bard's quotes into sales pitches for disreputable products. Or rewrite spammers' missives in iambic pentameter. All the comments section is a page and we are merely bloggers.
flwyd: (spam lite)
I've gotten a lot of spam recently with subjects like My boyfriend's tool is too big for my mouth. Let's assume they're selling penis enlargement pills rather than oversized novelty dental equipment or jaw enlargement pills. This doesn't strike me as an effective message to sell the product. "Take our pills and it will be physically impossible for your girlfriend to give you head!"

Mental Images

Monday, August 6th, 2007 01:28 pm
flwyd: (spam lite)
From the Quote of the Day iGoogle plugin:
You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.
-- Albert Einstein

I also got a spam message today from an address @portlandhottub.com. While I assume that domain is owned by someone who sells hot tubs in Portland, the first thing that came to mind was every person in Portland, OR lounging in a very large hot tub. Now that would be my kind of city.

flwyd: (spam lite)
Cleaning out the spam in my "contains an image, not addressed to tstone" box, I found the following subject:
Llamas have a dignified, aristocratic manner about them.
The first line after the image was:
Surprisingly, there is a market for llama manure.

Your challenge, dear reader, is to leave a comment with an entertaining pair of sentences of the form X have a dignified, aristocratic manner about them. Surprisingly, there is a market for X manure. Feel free to use different (but similar in tone) words in place of "dignified," "aristocratic," and "manure" for comedic effect.

Vegan Spam?

Monday, February 26th, 2007 11:24 pm
flwyd: (spam lite)
In the past few weeks, I've received a few random comments on recent posts (1 2) unrelated to the subject at hand.
Great design, useful info!This resourse is great!Keep it up!With the best regards!
Frank (not [livejournal.com profile] frank, natch)
Hello, thanks a lot, You'v done a great job.I can only realize how much time and resources does it take to create such a resource!Great work, I am impressed!
I got another one today on a sweet and geeky post not in the most recent 30, but from all the way back in 2003.
Yes!
Hi! Author, I'll just agree with you.
And just cool design, interesting site name flwyd.livejournal.com :), I see you you're are not newbe. Don't stop the nice job!
This post came from 58.221.255.166. According to my IP Locator Dashboard widget, that's in Jiangsu, China. The others came from Shangdong (60.217.227.135) and Beijing (221.192.34.250).

This has all the hallmarks of spam except one: where's the potted meat? They're not selling anything. They're not linking anywhere. There's no way to contact the poster. Just generic positive comments in odd English.

I can think of two explanations:
  1. Chinese Internet users are practicing their English. They've learned some stock phrases, but their comprehension isn't very good, so they don't say anything about the content of the blog.
  2. The comments originally contained links with cross-site-scripting attempts and LiveJournal silently removed the Krusty-Os from the Spam, leaving a nice wholesome product.


Wherefore I receive them I care not, because it gave me an opportunity to read a touching post from the past. Do any of my readers have amusing examples of this phenomenon?

Phish and Chips

Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 07:02 pm
flwyd: (spam lite)
Blogging randomly generated spam is passe, but this hand crafted spam is enjoyable.

Headers )Good day,


This is an email from Rac Plc in United Kingdom; also know as Great Britain,
We would like to know if you would be interested to work for us, as a
part-time job, which would not disturb your current job or your current
position?


We have our company here in United Kingdom and we deal on Car Buying, Car
care, Insurance, Training on how to drive, Loans and leasing, Motorcycle
services and so many more, we have few client from the USA/CANADA,
California, Florida, New York, Ontario, Quebec and so many other states in
the USA/CANADA, but we have been having problems with most of our clients
from USA/CANADA, because some would prefer to pay by Cashiers Check or
Money Orders, which we can not cash here, but it is easy to cash over in
the USA/CANADA, so we are looking forward to get representatives around the
USA/CANADA that can be working for us as a part-time job, which we are
willing to pay 10% of every money you receive from our clients, so you
would just need to help us get the payment and get it cashed directly from
your bank and send the money to us down here in United Kingdom or to any of
our local offices worldwide via Money Gram outlet or western union.Read more... )
Let's play "What's wrong with this picture?"
  • The domain rac.co.uk is legit, and some details (like the company number) match the whois registry. But what company has held their own domain since before 1996, but receives email at myway.com? And what British company would send mail from a *.pl (Poland) address?
  • Business with this company includes buying cars, auto insurance, and learning to drive. We can deduce from the email that they supposedly lack a U.S. branch. How much business can they do selling cars to people on the other side of an ocean? Who would learn how to drive remotely... from a teacher who drives on the other side of the road? And if they have to process cashier's checks through random guys they meet on the Internet, how painful do you think it would be to get reimbursed for an insurance claim?
  • Why would they require "details of where you work and your position in your work place" if this is a "part-time job, which would not disturb your current job or your current position?"
  • Official correspondence from British companies typically goes through people who spent many years in British schools getting into fights learning the rules of the English language. The sentence "Send to us: 1800.00USD and you pay the cost of sending from the $1800.00 or from the money left with you after deducting your income" doesn't sound like any of the Brits I know. The Brits I know also don't use paragraph-long run-on sentences.

On the plus side, they realize that "the cost of coming to the States to get the payment and go to cash it our self, will be lot more stressful." A transatlantic flight to pick up a cashier's check at a PO Box, exchange it for currency, and then fly back (with airport money exchange rates no less) would be quite stressful. The plane tickets would probably take a big bite out of the $2000.00USD transaction.

In summary, if someone in Poland ever sends you an email on behalf of a British company and asks you to send a cashier's check to a random dude in USA/CANADA or, if you prefer, "Money Gram or western union," I suggest you reconsider your provider for leased cars and motorcycle services.

Ambiguspam

Friday, December 8th, 2006 09:41 pm
flwyd: (fun characters)
Considering how much spam I get by email, I'm impressed how little comment spam I get on LiveJournal. I'm not even sure if the random comments are spam. There's no way for the poster to profit from that comment, but if it's legitimately someone who wants to learn English there's no contact information to start a conversation.

Regardless, I doubt the person is in the UAE:
host 87.118.106.117
117.106.118.87.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer ns.km21811-02.keymachine.de.

keymachine.de appears to be a web hosting company in Germany.

Inadequate Subject

Tuesday, July 25th, 2006 01:26 pm
flwyd: (spam lite)
I just received a spam with the subject Your penis is smaller than the smallest cell phone. Forget about it with Penis Enlarge Patch.

While I don't own a cell phone, I've seen a lot in use. And while there are some pretty small earpieces, the UI requirement of being able to dial numbers places a certain minimum size on a cell phone without radical redesign (such as taking all input audially). I've never seen a cell phone with a single column of numbers; they're always at least in a 3x4 grid. Given the average finger size and the maximal known penis girth, I don't think anyone has a penis wider than the smallest cell phone.

I also doubt I've seen a cell phone shorter than six inches, which is around the median penis size. Anything smaller is worthy of ridicule as it does an insufficient job of spanning the mouth-to-ear distance.
flwyd: (spam lite)
Sometimes spam is more entertaining than your legitimate e-mail.
Viagra: Take the blue pill and see how far the rabbit hole goes...
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