It’s not in my nature to gloat. However today I have to. You, my friend, are a Loser! All of you! You hard-working, back-breaking morons. You get up before dawn. Spend a good deal of your life in traffic jams to get to work and work your asses to the bone. And for what? For a small pay and a mortgage debt bigger than the sun. You are all losers! Excuse me for my behavior. I used to be one of you. I used to be an underpaid corporate slave. But I leave those days behind me. What? No, not because of the google ads. That is just for fun, to see how ad-sense matches up ads to words in the post. The reason is a mail I got last friday. My ticket to wealth and happiness…

See? I’m filthy rich now! One million pound Sterling. And the funny thing is: I don’t even remember entering the British lottery web promotion. Isn’t that remarkable?

Now you may think that this is a scam. That is what I thought too. In Holland we currently have a public awareness program called “drie keer kloppen” which can be loosly translated as “tripple check”. This program (set up by all major banks in Holland) tries to make the internet banking public aware of scams. You basically have to check three things:

1. Check your software (patch virus scanner, patch OS, patch browsers)
2. Check the URL (always check the URL even if the screen looks like your banking application)
3. Check your payment (Is your payment correct or did it get mangled/changed along the way?)

Now since I’m made aware I also got into the habit of applying some checks to my mail. So here we go:

1. Check the sender. The From-field clearly shows that this email comes from the British lottery. Furthermore the mail is sent by Mrs. Sharon Weber. Her email address is ‘allshewants11@charter.net’. She’s very dedicated since she uses her private time and email address to send corporate mail. I like Sharon. She gets things done.
2. The person to contact is Perry Diamond. Catchy name. The email address of Perry is ‘info.perry@yahoo.com.hk’. The name of the person and the name in the mail address (info.perry) are alike. The name is checked and confirmed. Very reliable.
3. The reply to address is also ‘info.perry@yahoo.com.hk’. I don’t have to worry about that my reply is actually send to someone else than Perry Diamond (for possibly fraudulent purposes).

So after my initial skepticism I’m totally convinced now. The names and headers all look fine to me. No, I don’t think it’s funny that I have to contact someone to claim my price. No, I don’t think it’s suspicious that Perry Diamond has a public Hong-Kong yahoo email address. No, I don’t think it’s weird that Sharon Weber sends mail like this under her online avatar ‘allshewants11′.

So if my employer and colleagues are reading this: Bye bye suckers! I resign. If I don’t show up at work I’ll be claiming my ticket to wealth and riches through my good friend Perry Diamond. I hope you enjoy going to work every single day for the rest of your lives. So long suckers!

Now on a more serious note: I actually thought of replying to this. I would create a fake email address somewhere and write to Perry. I would tell Perry that I’m very happy with the prize since we are 200.000 pound short. I would tell him my youngest son needs an operation at the cost of 250.000 pounds and that I only have 50.000 pounds so far. The prize money would be more than welcome.

I just wanted to see if the bastard was trying to get my 50.000 pounds despite the situation I just described. I wanted to see how ruthless these people really are…. However when I reply to mails like this I’m part of the problem. Replying to spam will cause more spam. So I didn’t reply. Should I have? What do you think?

This entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 8:39 and is filed under funny. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.