Confirm Your Price !!

Last month I posted the username and password of one my yahoo accounts stan_project@yahoo.com on the blog, in the spirit of experiment.

In that month I have :-

* Won the Irish Lottery 11 times
* Won the British/UK National Lottery a disappointing twice
* Won a Euro Lottery twice more

The fact that I haven't bought a lottery ticket anywhere in the world wasn't an obstacle to this.

I have also been approached by 6 different people to help them get a combined total of over $1bn out of various accounts in Africa.

If that isn't enough money, a bank with a hotmail email account have also invited me to borrow "within therange of $5,000 to $100,000,000 USD" at only 3% interest.

Result of the experiment ... er, nothing much really. I only received 25 pieces of spam mail - less than one a day. And the level of sophistication of the spam was laughable. In fact the title of one of my Irish Lottery winning emails was "Confirm Your Price!!", which contained the following passage, which has the highest density of geographical and typographical errors I've seen

The Irish National Lottery is approved by the Uk Gaming Board. In other to claim your won Amount (Four Hundred and fifty thousand pounds
sterling).prize from the lottery board you are required to contact our
Claims Agent here in the UK with the details below:

... and then a hotmail email address and a UK mobile phone number.

And the African ones were even less convincing.

Just how insane, stupid, gullible or just blinded by desperation would you have to be to fall for one of these ? I do read that people do get suckered and the mails wouldn't keep coming if no-one took the bait.

Some people use junk mail as fuel for their fires - I wonder if it will ever be possible to use spam email as a power source - it is plentiful, free and shows no signs of running out anytime soon.