Every day we get spam in the inbox; it’s a sad fact of life. If it were paper based junk mail then by now it would have stopped as we would have identified the originator and complained to the proper authorities.
But the internet has put a stop to that. Today email arrives unannounced and mostly unwanted into your inbox and there’s little you can do to stop it.
And of course by now we are seasoned experts on this. We know what is junk and what isn’t, often just by looking at the subject line. For example here it the UK we simply wouldn’t open an email offering ‘Maid Services’ and it’s not a phrase in common use here. Anything with ‘Home Depot’ in it is also going to be deleted pronto, as will anything saying ‘Neighborhood Alert’ as frankly its not how we spell Neighbourhood.
But this week, surprise surprise, one almost slipped through the net.
Into my personal email comes this little beauty;
eBay Spam
Now you have to admire this as a piece of work. For a second it genuinely had me going. It looks pretty much like the real thing and at first glance it would seem that an eBay member wants to make me an offer, for £600 no less! For one second I was tempted to click on the link but only because I’d made a couple of offers on eBay just last week.
But then something stopped me. The spidey senses started tingling and sure enough, hovering over the link I quickly realised that I was going to be redirected to a Turkish website. Good those these guys were, they hadn’t been able to produce a convincing link to a website and at that point it all fell apart.
And of course when you look more closely at it there are clear problems with it, such as the poor grammar, lack of capitalisation on the letter ‘I’, a feedback score of just 6 (and I’m always wary of new eBayers) and finally the small detail that I’m not actually selling an iPad retina. Other than that though its pretty good.
I suppose the moral of the story here is that these days no email can be regarded as safe if it contains any kind of link or attachment. And that is a shame as the actions of just a few condemn the rest of us to endure inconvenience that should be totally unnecessary. Something to ponder next time you go through Airport Security…..
