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April Fools! The day’s weirdest spams revealed…

Today, we just couldn't resist sifting through our Spam Stash. Here's some comment spam from Naked Security that we thought would amuse you...

Today, we just couldn’t resist sifting through our Spam Stash.

(Not for the first time, either, if we’re honest.)

After all, it’s the First of April, better known as April Fools’ Day.

And we wondered, “Do spammers celebrate it?”

Perhaps this is the one day of the year that they stop trying to bombard us with crummy products that do exist but we don’t want?

Today, perhaps, spammers try to make us smile by telling us witty stories about things that don’t exist, but that we’d want if only they did?

You know, like spaghetti trees, Facebook’s perennial spring cleaning closure, and security covers for your iPhone made out of “polar foil” (yes, it’s an anagram) recycled from empty chip packets.

So, here are some of today’s comment spams from Naked Security that we thought would amuse you.

Spammed product: Dodgy PSN credentials

The thing that intrigued us about this spam is that once we’d read it through carefully several times, we started to think that we were on the point of understanding it, yet, amazingly, we never did.

Spammed product: Dodgy “brand name” basketball shoes

The thing that worried us about this one is that after reading it through a few times, we felt a rising sense of alarm that we might suddenly begin to understand it after all.

So we moved on quickly to…

Spammed product: Dodgy “brand name” fashion clothing

We found this spam very useful, as we’d never stopped to think that proper waterproof sealant on bathroom tiles might be a good idea.

This was, in fact, a strangely effective spam that made us want to buy grout right away, but when we clicked through, the spammer was offering us something completely different.

Who would have thought that commercial tile sealants were a fashion sales vehicle?

Spammed product: Hooky SEO services

We were convinced.

If you’re going to hire an expert, you might as well choose someone who knows what they’re talking about!

Spammed products: Counterfeit shoes, bags, shades and scarves

This one made us smile.

It looks as though the crooks’ spam cannon software accidentally blasted out their whole list of dodgy domains instead of the teaser text that would usually make up the body of each email.

Of course, this spam may have be sneakier than it looks: perhaps Crook A merely wanted to publicise Crook B’s URL list in one hit.

That would be a handy way to ensure your rivals’ entire URL database got blocklisted immediately.

Spammed products: Craigslist account credentials

We didn’t think the mental imagery of “breakfast coming over again” was quite the right way to get readers into a buying mood.

But maybe some purchasers like the visceral approach?

Do spammers celebrate April Fools’ Day?

So, is this the one day of the year that spammers stop trying to bombard us with crummy products that do exist but we don’t want?

Doesn’t look like it, does it?

0 Comments

To paraphrase the mathematician Émile Borel, if you put an infinite number of spammers in a room with an infinite number of computers…

Reply

Umm, grout is the mortar placed in the gaps between ceramic tiles, not the sealant. The sealant is usually a silicone product which serves to prevent stains in the porous grout material.

Reply

Don’t you get silcone grout these days? A sort of one-stop fill-and-seal?

I would have found out, I suppose, were it not for the bait-and-switch :-)

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