There are so many people around the world that want to give me money or products

I can't help but laugh when I get something like this in my inbox:

You have a bank draft of $800.000.00 USD which await outstanding payment of $100usd USD.You need to Contact Mr. Hemant Singh Email: fedexdeliver83@yahoo.in Tel: +919920343690

After decades of the same thing, I would have thought that strategies and methods should be updated. It doesn't help that several hundred other people are CCed on the email either. Since I started to use the internet (in highschool, really) there have just been the same general types of messages. I specifically recall getting a message allegedly from a distressed banker in the Ivory Coast when I was a senior in high school (he wanted to use me as a safe way to get his money out of the country, giving me a generous share in exchange for my help of course), and I found it absolutely hilarious. Almost as funny as me being the last living relative of a recently deceased Taiwanese millionaire. But that was in 2005 or 2006. There hasn't been much creativity in the format or the content in the past decade, as far as I'm aware. Sure, the graphic images are more common, but this isn't changing the core concept; that kind of change is just window dressing around the periphery. Where are the Bill Gates and the Steve Jobs of the spamming world? Where are the smart and creative entrepreneurs? Where are the intelligent and innovative marketing strategies?


Sadly enough, the spam I see tends to be of the lowest quality. Today my Yahoo inbox recieved a message which was alledgedly a "Payment Release Instruction from Federal Reserve Bank of New York," which didn't even have any text in the body; just an attachment. I also got an anouncement saying that Amazon's new Kindle Fire could behad for just sever or eight dollars. Seriously? I can't even buy a basic cell phone, non-smart, for that little. Do people really believe that one could buy a brand new kindle for that little? I am not sure if I should be dissapointed with the spammer side of this equation for their lack of creativity or for the victim side of this for showing the spammers that their foolish methods are actually effective.

As if a free iPhone wasn't suspicious already, look at the email address it comes from!

To rap on the spammers a bit, they could do way better targeting. From the information that is available about me online, it is easy to see that I am male, young, and educated. Anyone who is a personal contact of mine online can see considerably more, such as I am not religious, I like circus and languages, etc. Despite that, I still get plenty of adds for viagra (which I don't need), christian singles dating sites (which I don't need), acne medicine (which I don't need), and imitation Prada materials (which I don't need). If the spammers would just do some better customer reasearch they could target me with things like language learning courses, travel packages, or juggling equipment. Even the automatic adds on facebook and google can figure that stuff out. 

I am going to work with the assumption that the spammers are not going to hire the additional staff just to do customer/market research, but that is okay: with so much information online digital text it can be done with a couple good computer programs. With just a bit of intelligent research, which I am sure could be automated, spammers could significantly increase the click-through rates and get a lot more "bites." Rather than flailing around at random, a well-planned strategy targeted to specific customer groups would be so simple to create. Plenty of people don't use the privacy settings on their Facebook, Google, or other accounts. A simple machine analysis of someone's tweets could easily show what topics they are interested in, and hacking into someone's Facebook account is not too difficult for someone that knows about hacking (or so I have heard). 


Taking myself as an example, I am sure that an automated information gathering program could easily discover what kind of music, movies, and activities I like. This would allow the spammers to stop wasting Viagra and Christian single dating site spam on me, and they could instead try to trick me by sending discount juggling clubs, travel deals, and cheap books my way. If they don't do their research, they end up telling me that I can learn Chinese, which is kind of a waste, since I already know Chinese:

Does anyone actually think it's possible to learn any language (beyond the 'survival level') in just 10 days? If this spam succeeds, it lowers my faith in the intelligence of human beings.

One encouraging fact (in the sense of efficiency and intelligence) is that I began to receive Chinese language spam (although of similarly disappointing quality) once I began to get online in Chinese. I also remember being quite excited about receiving my first item of spam in Spanish. Thank goodness that the gmail spam system is as multilingual as me! (one of the reasons I stopped using Yahoo's email service was an overwhelming amount of Spam)