419 Scams As A Way Of Keeping Up On Current Events
from the how-do-you-keep-up? dept
I'm beginning to think that it could be an interesting subject to study what cultural/national situations are referenced by 419 "advance fee" scam emails. While the most common such email comes from Nigeria, they've adjusted over time to pick up on other countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, they're trying to pick up on events, like the Olympics. They all look pretty much the same, though - and if your pattern matching ability is so weak that you can't realize this is the exact same scam you've got other problems. Still, some people continue to fall for such scams on a regular basis.
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No Subject Given
and if you're pattern matching ability is so weak
"your" - None of the possessive pronouns use an apostrophe: my, mine, your, yours, his, her, hers, its, their, theirs, our, ours, whose.
Conversely, if it has an apostrophe and a pronoun, it is a conjunction two words: I am, he is, it is, they are, who is, etc.
Remembering that one rule can save you a lot of similar homonym mistakes.
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Re: No Subject Given
NO MORE POSTS FOR YOU ED ! :-)
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No Subject Given
I was thinking the same thing a year ago, when I wrote some spam rules just for finding these things and filing them separately. From all of the deposed dictators throughout Africa, to all of the shenanigans of the middle eastern families, you could learn a lot of geography. Maybe that's a cheap way to introduce some of these topics to the email generation in school. (Or are we past the email generation, and well into the im generation?)
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Re: No Subject Given
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419 aka Spanish Prisoner
http://www.hidden-knowledge.com/funstuff/spanishprisoner/spanishprisoner.html
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No Subject Given
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