Spamming the spammers?
January 31st, 2006 at 10:39pm
Every now and then I take a look at one or two of my spam emails, and last night was one such occasion.
One of the emails was the usual “I have millions of dollars from the bank account of a deceased person and want you to help me move it” email, except it had quite a difference, this one was supposedly from Simon Renaud who told me:
My name is Simon Renaud. I work with the Private Banking Division
At Leadenhall Bank Limited, London. We are conducting a standard
process investigation in relation to matters involving a client who
sharesthe same name as yours (Kristoph) and also the circumstances
surrounding investments made by this client at our bank.
Simon then went on to make vague threats about being the next of kin or else. I ignored this email.
The next spam email I decided to read told me that I had won an international lottery, and I should ring a phone number to claim my prize. I decided to fire up Skype and make the phone call, this not only masks my real location and is much cheaper, but also makes it appear to the call recipient that I am in their local area.
When I dialled the number, they answered the phone with the name of the company in the email, I muted the microphone and listened to them yelling “hello, hello, hello” followed by something in another language which sounded like “gwizkjcrizkm” before they hung up. As these were annoying spammers I decided to continue, and rang them again, which resulted in a similar response.
The third time around I found an MP3 of people talking and played that to the spammer, the spammer seemed confused by this as he kept asking them to “slow down”. I decided to ring again and this time delivered a message of “stop sending spam”, the spammer replied with “what?”, I repeated the message and received a rather pleasant message of “F*** off”.
I decided to ring again with silence and this time heard a conversation taking place in the background, I clearly heard them saying “I think it’s the police”, they did not hang up the phone on this occasion, so I hung up and tried calling a couple more times, but my call was diverted to voicemail. Hopefully this taught the spammers a lesson.
Sometimes it can be quite amusing to see how spammers respond to someone playing their game, however I did find my scam holiday conversation much more interesting than the spammers I encountered last night.
Entry Filed under: Samuel's Editorials
8 Comments
1. Chuck Berry | January 31st, 2006 at 11:13 pm
Looks like the hunters have become the hunted. Good on you Samuel. I think this is an amusing post. Just a note – what about playing them the intro?
2. Chuck Berry | January 31st, 2006 at 11:42 pm
If I was Howard Hughes I would have employed Samuel to look after my affairs in my dotage. He is morally incorruptable and would definately not steal my money or women.
3. punky_brewster | February 1st, 2006 at 1:08 pm
That’s gold! Good on you!
I can’t believe you did that. Very impressive 🙂
4. heatseeker | February 1st, 2006 at 4:01 pm
I think find out where there office is and set fire to it, and rig a couple of big rocks to drop on their heads as they flee the inferno …
5. Samuel | February 1st, 2006 at 4:03 pm
Too much work, and probably a criminal offence heatseeker.
6. 1000umbrellas | February 2nd, 2006 at 10:57 am
hilarious, but you should have recorded it, just like your conversations with John Laws.
7. Erg | February 2nd, 2006 at 3:54 pm
Nice work – not many would bother to mess with them in sucha fashion. Good Job SGS.
Erg
8. demented_cupcake | February 2nd, 2006 at 11:10 pm
It’s so good to hear that spammers get some of their own medicine.
Not that it’d discourage them that much…but once in a blue moon, something like this to handle them is a good laugh.
It wouldn’t be so bad if some of the spam was actually USEFUL.
The spam I get most annoyed with is the “enlarge your *****. I definitely don’t need any further enlargement. Besides…who wants to be as big as John Holmes anyway? I once heard he had lots of trouble using something that big anyway.
Give ’em heaps, Sam