Tried and True Scamming Methods Never Go Out of Style

I've been studying marketing for the last several months, and one thing I've learned is to keep doing what works. I guess that applies to spammers and scammers as well. As Ross Perot said, "Ready. Aim. Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire!"

Here's one I haven't seen in a while: making the entire message body an image attachment. The latest offer I got came (allegedly) from Google! Immediately, I noticed a few grammatical errors, including a message subject line of "Att: Congratulation' You have won US$400,000,00.Dollars." Sadly, given the sorry state of education in this country, I'll bet that most readers of this or similar messages would not even pick up on these little hints. That said, they probably can't be counted on to indicate that English is a second language to the writer.

The horribly re-sized Gmail logo at the top was obviously taken off a website, and up-scaled to take up the bulk of the page. I also observed than an "official looking" email address of "[email protected]" is given, but the sender's address is "[email protected]." For those who don't know, .sk is the country code for Slovakia. And yet, the message purports to be from South Africa. And Google's headquarters is in Mountain View, California.

And people still fall for this stuff, or the scammers wouldn't be doing it.