If I were to believe the messages bombarding my spam folder every day, I would have been a multi-trillionaire three times over in the last 10 years. But what to do, my parents brought me up to be a wise girl and I have a computer nerd for an elder brother, so no excuses for being scam-bait. So here I am, poorer by a few billion dollars, saying no to the winning promotions of Chevron, Microsoft, United Nations, BBC and (gasp!) BMW.
What I have been noticing of late on my Twitter and Facebook stream is that a lot of friends and follows have become ‘vocal’ about the contents of their spam folder. I frequently see jokes like, “It broke my heart to say no to $50,000 from United Nations, but I am noble like that” or “Girls, tonight’s the drinks on me. Mrs Shayla Lopez from Cayman Islands has willed all her bank funds to me”. I am sure you guys have hilarious spam mails and promotional sms messages hitting your inboxes every day.
- If each spam was authentic, I would be a multi-gazillionaire today
So, what is spam? To begin with, spam is not merely a commercial message or a promotional email sent over by a sweating, white-collared marketing executive mass mailing 100,000 messages to a random database just to meet a deadly monthly sales target! Spam is, firstly, unsolicited (we don’t ask for it) – mailers and brochures that are slipped beneath our doors, phone calls from telemarketers, sms (short messaging services) promoting the launch of a product or some insurance schemes that we don’t sign up for.
Secondly, most email and sms spam is automated, meaning, they are not sent by that hard-working marketing guy, rather an automated program or bot is fed a database of millions of web addresses, blog urls (or mobile numbers), inviting us to click on a link, respond to a message, sign up on a new website, or verify/confirm our residential address. It’s all automated because companies have a huge market segment to target and a limited budget to reach its audience. ‘Spamming’ then becomes an easy – but ineffective – way of reaching maximum eyeballs.
A researcher from Centre for Internet and Society, India, undertook an interesting experiment when she decided to reply to one of her regular spammers! Having received the winning notification of $550,000 from Shell BP Manchester (Shell is one of the world’s biggest petroleum companies), the researcher decided to take the ‘dubious’ (not authentic) emailer on his claims and replied to the address mentioned. In the series of response-and-reply, what became clear is that although Shell BP Manchester appeared to be a registered company – with the Queen of England’s blessing too – the spam emailer was clearly after the researcher’s money. Here’s what they said in one of their last correspondence:
“Do not discuss your winning with anybody until your prize has been transferred to you. It is for your own good. And it is at that time alone that you can be used for advert purposes by our company. So the success of this transfer lies sorely in your hands. These are the exact words from the Director this morning.”
Being an academic researcher on digital culture, the researcher obviously wasn’t fooled into sending any real money to Shell BP Manchester, however, think about the thousands of men and women, with no hands-on knowledge about spam, bots or malware. What is really the tricky part about spam messages, and I would go so far as to say evil actually – is that the actionable instructions required in the email – sign up, click here, send us your address – play into our very real “wish list”: loads of money in American dollars, an all-expense-paid vacation to an exotic island, an anonymous stranger transferring all her property and wealth to our name. Wouldn’t you agree that most of us dream of a shortcut to ending our middle-class status and when we happen to see a subject line saying ‘congratulations, you have won $100,000′, for an infinitely small moment we do want that spam to be true…
And that desire or aspiration is exactly what marketing companies (both the legitimate and the fraudulent ones) count on to catch our attention. The subject lines are well-known – Congratulations!!!, Attention Plz!!, My Dear Madam, Greetings!! Urgent Message! all get filtered as spam, because business emails don’t ever carry such headings. While legitimate messages promoting a product can be irritating and most of us simply ignore them, fake emails claiming we have won a lottery – when we clearly didn’t even buy a ticket – all count on our collective desire to be rich, at the expense of our common sense.
It wasn’t always about riches though. A couple of years ago, my email filter would spam messages for Erectile Dysfunction, Viagra, and various other strange-sounding pharmacological products and pills. And where there is Viagra, you’re sure to find spam-ads for XXX sites.
Spam messages also play into the blind faith we place in the names of big corporations. Anything that comes stamped with BMW, Yahoo, BBC or Chevron in the subject line immediately grabs our attention – and also ups our heart beat – perhaps IBM Corporation has a job for me! If you follow up on the links inside the spam email, the websites also look authentic, nothing to raise the doubts of those new to net surfing – our parents, for instance, who might not have used computers until recently; teenagers and kids who won’t think twice before giving up their home addresses. A quick research throws up statistics of cyber crime in the area of phishing, fraudulent sites, spam links that lead to virus and installation of malware on your computer, and thousands of email users losing money every year as they were tricked into paying up.
We have handed over control of spam to filters that come built-in with our email client and those who are tech-savvy further weed out junk mail by applying keyword filters to messages. Most of us though still browse through our spam box once a week or fortnight hoping that Gmail or Yahoo’s filter haven’t chucked an important or authentic email from an unknown but important person or company. Spam is a barometer of this generation’s aspirations and what most of us desire – for the moment, it’s about getting rich, quick. Another five years down the line we would probably be spammed with spaceship rides to the moon, cloning, or ______________… fill in the blanks, your futuristic guess is as good as anyone’s.
For further reading: http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html
