Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Like I'm that stupid

Whilst in the process of swapping over to Gmail, which is supposed to have much better spam filters, I still get plenty of junk on my old email address that Outlook doesn't manage to filter out. I've received several letters like this over the last few weeks. Italics are, of course, mine:

Important Message .

Good day,
My name is . CPT.Babara J. Minnich, I am an American soldier, I serve in the Military of the 1st Armored Division in Iraq, as you know we have being (Have being? What do they teach in those American schools?) attacked by insurgents everyday and car bombs. We where lucky to move funds belonging to Saddam Hussein?s family hopping it was a bomb in the box, (I'm always hopping for bombs. Or occasionally skipping. Depends on the situation) later we find out it was a fiscal cash .
The total amount is US$10,000,000 Ten Million United State dollars in cash, mostly 100 dollar bills which is still in our co sturdy at the military base camp, now we find it as a Big Risk (Gotta love Random Capitalisation) us if the Iraqis People get to find out about this box of money because we are not allowed to have any money in our position for that We are seeking for a (I am in awe of this grammar. IN. AWE!) trustworthy foreign business partner who can help us in receiving this box of money (Random line indent!)
so that He/She may invest it for us and keep our share for banking. This is our plan of sharing my partner and I will take 60%, you take the other 40%.

No stress attached, for we have made all necessary arrangement for shipping it out of Iraq, Iraq is a war zone. (No? Is it? I had no clue as I have been living under a large rock) We planed on using diplomatic courier service for shipping the money out in one large silver box declaring it as family valuables using diplomatic immunity. (Cunning!)
If you are interested I will send you the full details, my job is to find a good partner that we can trust to assist us. Can I trust you? When you receive this letter, kindly send me an e-mail signifying your interest including your most confidential telephone/fax numbers for quick communication also your contact details. This business is risk free. (Apart from the fact that we will have your "most confidential" phone numbers and address!) The box can be shipped out in 48hrs. Please send your reply to my private mail box: babarajminnic-at-aol.fr

Respectfully,
CPT.Barbara (Note this is the one and only time she correctly spells her own name - with two r's) Joan Minnich

I mean, HELLO? Like I would be that dumb as to send you my contact details, especially to a different email address than the one this one arrived from. And, let's face it, even if this were genuine (and pigs were circling the sky as I type) anyone with such a terrible grasp of the English language does not deserve $6,000,000!

Proper post coming soon...I promise :)

5 comments:

Kait said...

Heh. If you could trace that, I bet it would come from Nigera.

Who is that dumb to think that it might be legit? I mean, grammar aside, don't you think that any soldier finding that much money would accidentally tell the wrong person, and it would be taken from them? I am pretty sure that it's not allowed to pillage! Just a thought.

Gah. I get so irritated. I don't believe that anyone is this dumb any more, as anyone with any sense isn't going to fall for something this dumb. It offends my sensibilities! :o)

Anonymous said...

This is my first time reading your blog (I came here from www.smashleybug.com), and I noticed a problem with some of your HTML (specifically, the header image). Being the shy/geeky type, I feel awkward having my first comment to you being something like that. Plus, in the past I've had people react very defensively when I was only trying to be helpful - so now I always ask first.

Would you like to know more about the problem, and how to fix it?

By the way, I love the way you talk (err, type) - it sounds so proper and formal. People from the UK are so sophisticated! It sounds like I'm being sarcastic, but I'm not. I genuinely mean it.

starrynite said...

Kait - I know, it's ridiculous! I am sure no one is that dumb.

ATO - You are my hero! The header is fine on IE7 (at least, as far as I can tell) but my friend who uses firefox was telling me yesterday that my banner is HUGE and I have NO CLUE how to fix it, so all help is gladly received!!!

Anonymous said...

Cool! I love it when attractive females tell me I'm their hero. :D

Anyway, I looked at the source code, and I think I see the problem. In the img tag for that picture, you're defining the dimensions with cm's, when it should just be a number (which by default, would be a pixel value). So instead of height=200cm width=740cm, you should have height="200" width="740". Also, the image itself (before the browser resizes it) is really, really big. I'd recommend resizing it to 200x740 (or whatever size you want it to be), uploading it, and then you wouldn't even need to define the dimensions in HTML. Also, the span tag around the image is causing W3C compliant browsers (like Firefox, etc) to add a space before the image, which makes it look skewed. Since that span tag appears to be erroneous, just delete it.

Also, your user picture (or whatever you call it, the one under "About Me") has a similar problem in that it's a huge image being resized into a much, much, much smaller one. All you need to do to fix that is upload a smaller one.

I'm not sure if I made much sense, feel free to ask for clarification...I suck at communicating without confusion.

starrynite said...

I resized both so I hope that helps. Let me know :)

I'm not sure about the span tag though. I'm using the blogger template because although I'd love to move to MT or something, I really don't have the knowhow to design a template myself. So it could be something in the blogger template...I'm sure I haven't put a span tag in anywhere...not least cos I don't actually know what it does. Haha.