Aiding and abetting the spammers

Being at something of a loose end on Sunday, I spent a little time writing back to one of the spammers that regularly plagues my company with spurious offers - since I wrote the email mostly for my own amusement and cannot imagine the broken pidgin of my probably Chinese correspondent was up to appreciating the effort I went to, I thought I'd share it with you guys.

Dear Angela

Thank you for your email. We do not intend to buy any domains from you or do business with you in any way. Since you have asked for an explanation and I am a generous and indulgent man I will offer one – you are running a very, very obvious scam and only a simpleton would fall for it. When fishing for companies to ensnare in this scam in future, you may wish to consider some or all of the following

(1) Your basic story makes not an iota of sense. You apparently contacted me because “another company in the UK” applied to you to register some URLs which bear a passing similarity to URLs used by my company. Why would you ever contact me about such a thing? Assuming for the sake of argument that another UK company has placed such an order with you, why not simply process that order and take their money rather than take the extraordinary risk of breaching their confidentiality to go trawling for third parties who might be interested in thwarting your client’s instructions?

(2)    My name is not Claire. Legitimate businesses generally tend to get this bit right, not least because it appears in both the “from” field of all my emails and in the footer where people invariably list their own names.

(3)    Legitimate businesses do not customarily send emails during the very early hours of Sunday morning.

(4)    You have contacted me, and indeed give every appearance of still being unwittingly in correspondence with me, about two entirely separate domains that I manage. At no time have you appeared to realise that both of these conversations are with the same company, let alone the same individual (which may at least shed some light on the delusion that my name is Claire), so we have somehow managed to carry out much the same conversation twice.

(5)    At least one of the things you propose to sell to me does not in fact exist. What do you even imagine I would be paying for if I was to buy “global protection for my company’s keyword”?

I confess that I have rather enjoyed our conversations – the feeble transparency of your scam has at least removed any element of doubt, and while it hardly constitutes a public service to point out to you where you went most obviously wrong I trust that in future communications you will make some similarly childish error which will entirely give the game away. However, since I really do not plan to give you any money I must insist that this be the last time we correspond, and while I cannot precisely wish you good luck, hoping as I do that no-one is ever foolish enough to do business with you, I will at least wish you very good health and the sense to find a different line of work before you actually starve.

Yours etc

Seamus