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April 18, 2006

EMAIL Hell - The Amazing Disappearing Microsoft Lottery Prize

by Ferdinand T Cat

Somebody mixed the old Microsoft EMAIL hoax with the slightly more recent lottery hoax and came up with this.

Dear Lucky winner,
WINNING NOTIFICATION

The prestigious Micrsoft and aol has set out and sucessfully organised a Sweepstakes marking the end of year anniversary we rolled out over (Two million Great Britain Pounds) for our Annual Draws. Participants for the draws were randomly selected and drawn from a wide range of web hosts which we enjoy their patronage.

Return address in Lucida fontTo make the message appear less convincing, most of it is rendered in Lucida Cursive, a decorative font that is only supposed to be used for titles and headings. It's okay in small doses, as you can see to the left, but a whole page of the stuff will make your eyes water.

Even though I am a superior life form, I have to admit I could never pull off a scam like this one. I keep thinking of how my potential victims would be analyzing the message. For example, there is no sign of this Sweepstakes anywhere on the Microsoft web site. Thus, in order to fall for this hoax, you have to accept that Microsoft would want to spend millions of dollars on a secret publicity stunt. Worse, the announcement they're sending out regarding this secret publicity stunt specifies an EMAIL address belonging to a Polish portal domain. Trust me, if there's a million dollars at stake, the people running the contest should be able to cough up the $9.95 a month it costs to get a real MSN EMAIL address.

This has got to stop. Tell your friends and neighbors to stay clear of these idiotically transparent scams. If you're going to get scammed, make sure it's a scam with skill and polish, and not some pathetic tome in broken English from somebody too cheap to get a real EMAIL account.

We have to have standards or this whole civilization is going to fall apart.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat


# At Tue 11:59 PM | Permalink | Trackback URI | Comments (2) | More EMAIL Hell

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Tracked on April 21, 2006 5:45 AM

Comments

Me an Bonnie gots a message from E-Bay that said we didn't pay for the digital camera we ordered, so click to make arrangements. Our bean Mom wasn't sposed to know. How dare she duh-lete our purrsonal mail wifout letting us respond? We're cats, but if we can haf email, we should gets to answer it.


Posted by: Victor Tabbycat at April 19, 2006 8:51 PM

If we haf to get spam, make it high quality spam, worthy of our feline attention.


Posted by: Bonnie Underfoot at April 19, 2006 8:52 PM

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