Russian Spam

"We eat ham, and jam and Spam a lot."
— from Monty Python’s Spamalot.

I received the following email. This is the lamest spam email I’ve seen lately, although I rarely open obvious spam emails so it’s possible I’ve missed lamer ones. This one claims to be from a “Cindy Franklin” and it has a link (not included here) to a Russian website.

Dear customer,

Propceia - 0.15$
Levitra - 1.63$
Ciali - 1.82$
Viarga - 0.56$

feel the energy of love! buuy viugra at our durgst0re !

Only one drug is spelled correctly. Viagra is not only misspelled but it’s misspelled two different ways. “Buy” — a word with only 3 letters — is misspelled. Drug, the thing they’re selling, is misspelled durg. Their “durgst0re” has the numeral 0 in place of the letter “o”. (“Hey, pick me up a couple of durgs while you’re out.”)

If I want to be picky, I could also point out that they put the dollar sign after the price instead of before the price; the last two sentences should begin with a capital letter; and there shouldn’t be a space between the end of a sentence and the punctuation mark following it.

You’re in Russia, you’re trying to get me to buy pharmaceuticals from Russia, and you send me an email with only 19 words and 5 of them have their spelling garbled?

Really? Does that actually work?

The email is composed so badly that I question if it’s not on purpose. Perhaps it was sent by the Russian government but they want to make it look totally amateurish so I won’t suspect they sent it. We live in a paranoia-inducing world, at least on the Internet.

Some people may click the link out of curiosity. That’s all it takes to get malware on your computer. Your computer then becomes part of a botnet — millions of zombie computers networked and controlled by Russian criminals (or Russia’s FSB).