Yay, jsem získala loterie!

I was informed by the following email that I finally won the lottery!

UK NATIONAL LOTTERY

Vaše e-mailová adresa Vyhrál To je oficiálne oznámit, že výsledek našeho pocítace cerpat 844 tohoto dne zvolený Vaše jméno a e-mailovou adresu pripojen k vstupenek Císlo 034-22478556 s poradovým císlem 129, které následne vyhrál Velká Británie Lottery velkou udelování cen v 2. category. You mít bylo potvrzeno, že vítez kategorie B ve Spojeném království Lottery vylosuje pocítac remíz. Vaše tvrzení soubor byl rádne predána k tomuto kancelár s pokyny, které jsme se pri manipulaci s prevodem Vaší cenu 1,000000.00 £ GBP. (One Million Velká Británie libra) na Váš úcet nominován. Laskave poslat níže informace o pohledávky.

Oh no, actually, it's my email address that had the winning ticket. It's been having quite a bit of a gambling problem lately and I've been trying to talk it out of staying up so late playing at multiple online poker tables at once. It recently started buying UK Lotto tickets through a Czech bookmaker, and it seems to be paying off after all! One million British pounds! Yooohooooooooo.

Wait, I hope my email address is willing to share... After all I did for it, trying to keep it spam free and all, it should at least be a couple hundred thousand grateful, don't you think?

Seriously, why would the UK national lottery write to me in Czech???

Summer is watch season for everybody after all

This is an erratum to my previous post (Summer time is watch season), in which "losers" were denied the privilege of buying a tacky watch from a dubious website. Well, it turns out that I was mistaken, and that self-identified losers too deserve to fall for that!

See the last line of this screenshot of my spam folder, featuring a sample of the watch related spam I received:

"Our watch will look great even on any loser"

Hurray for non discriminatory, equal opportunity scams!

Hotmail passwords

Oooops. Not clear how all this happened, though... A phishing scam able to fool 10,000 users at once sounds fishy.

Studying? Why bother?

In the 10+ years that I worked in the higher education sector, it never occurred to me that bribery was a skill students could practice in school and actually use to advance from year to year and eventually graduate with a degree. By this, I mean that it didn't cross my mind even once that anyone among my co-workers was ever likely to take—or even receive—a bribe. Also I'm pretty sure that if anything like a bribe had ever been suggested by a student, they would have immediately been reported and the student would have been in for a very unpleasant chat with the members of the disciplinary board...

But maybe I'm naive.

I did receive letters and emails from students. Typically they would ask me to allow them to submit a mid-term paper even though they had been too busy to come to school after week 1, or they would beg me to give a couple of extra marks to their term paper so they would not have to repeat the class. However, those letters never suggested that their authors were ready to give me anything in exchange for a favor that, in any case, I was never ever going to grant them.

So, when once in a while an email like the following somehow caught my attention, I'd dismiss it as yet another scam:

WHAT A GREAT IDEA!

We provide a concept that will allow anyone with sufficient work experience to obtain a fully verifiable University Degree.

Bachelors, Masters or even a Doctorate.

For US: 1.845.709.8044
Outside US: +1.845.709.8044

"Just leave your NAME & PHONE NO. (with CountryCode)" in the voicemail.

Our staff will get back to you in next few days!

What a great idea indeed! It looks like a similar "concept" has been put in practice in Toulon, France. I don't think "sufficient work experience" was even a pre-requisite. A nice fat bundle of banknotes was, instead. See here (Le Monde article, in French), or here (France 24 article, in English).

Despicable.

Job-offer spam

More preying on people's credulity and helplessness. I came across this recent article by an AP reporter today. With the unemployment rate here in California about to reach 10%, the pool of people likely to fall for such scams is sadly getting bigger and bigger. Spam us not... please.