I can’t remember the last time I got an e-mail from a Nigerian scammer asking me to send a little good-will money his way so that I could eventually get my greedy little hands on a big-bucks inheritance from a long lost relative. Or any other scammer, for that matter.
Maybe it’s because, with so many e-mail accounts, I’m a moving target.
Or maybe my spam filters are just so damned good, they catch ‘em all. (I’ll have to check. I do kind of miss them.)
But my husband – who has remained AOL-loyal over the years – does get an occasional too-good-to-be-true offer dangled his way.
The most recent was a Happy New Year Offer! from Amazon.
Jim, it seems, is holding lucky ticket number 56 out of 100 winners.
56! A meaningful number indeed!
While this wasn’t the number of the house Jim grew up in, it was the number of the house I grew up in. As luck would have it. So this winning number seemed like an awfully providential coincidence.
So I avidly read on:
This is a random selection from Amazon.com on the occasion of this new year 2014, we selected more than one million customers in first step then we choosed just one hundred other customers also randomly to be winner of a coupon for $1,000.
Out of a million customers, they choosed us! Randomly. From a random selection.
Goody-goody.
The only unfortunate thing was that, the morning before Jim got his e-mail, I’d done a bit of Amazon spending – a gift for a baby shower, a couple of books.
Drat.
If only I had knowed that we were going to get choosed!
I almost goes without saying that, if someone’s going to give you an Amazonian $1,000 coupon, they might want a bit in return.
And that modest return was completing a short survey:
In order to download your coupon ticket code winner , you have to complete a short survey.
If you don't know how to complete it, read this instructions:
1) Click complete survey in the link below and you will see a list of the surveys.
2) Choose one of the surveys from the list and click on it.
3) Enter required information and submit it.
4) Wait couple of seconds and your download will start.
It wasn’t that I needed this instructions. I mean, I know how to fill out an online survey.
And I will say that I was curious about just what those surveys were.
I suppose that, if I weren’t such a fraidy cat, I would have clicked through to see just what the surveys were asking for.
Please enter your Social Security Number? Please let us know what credit card number to put the $1,000 on? Please give us your bank account credentials so we can plunk the money in there for you?
But my online fraidy cat, my scammer antenna, and my ardent desire not to get malwared/botnetted, prevented me from clicking through. So I had to settle for googling to see if some chump out there would actually admit to clicking through.
All I found was folks asking the ‘duh’ question: is this a scam? (And the info that Apple customers were targeted by the same choosed people.)
Well, duh…
Seriously, folks, isn’t someone who would fall for an offer conveyed in such piss-poor English too cretinous to figure out how to shop on Amazon to begin with?
Apparently not, or the scammers would choosed someone better to write their offer.
NOTE: You have to enter your real information to confirm you are not a robot, if you use fake information your download won't unlock and you lose your coupon code .
Actually, I don’t believe a robot would fall for this, even if there are actual human beings who do.
Too bad. If Amazon had actually choosed us, it would have been fun spending that $1K.
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