Spam ~ Fighting Fire With Fire

When you sit for long periods of time in front of a computer, and you have a fertile imagination like mine (and we all know what makes things fertile), weird and wonderful ideas pop into my head.

I regularly get spam from countries like Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and other places that tell me that the sender has access to millions of dollars and needs my help to get at it. I just have to send my identity, bank account number, a payment or two to facilitate things, and I will be a millionaire. Yeah right. Not only are they spammers, but they are scammers.

One thing that I have learned while writing healthcare software to be misused by cheating Nigerians, is that they are very very superstitious. Knowing this, I have decided to fight fire with fire when I get a piece of spam from them.

I have a throw-away email account that is mostly anonymous, so I use that in my arsenal. I send them a return email to all email accounts in the spam (usually there is an originating email address and one in the body of the email). I send them an email worded something like this:

You are an evil man. You are dishonest piece of dog scum. You send emails trying to steal money from people. I am disgusted by pigs like you. So I have gone to the voodoo Obeah -- the witch doctor and I had her lay a horrible curse on you. You will have horrible luck, and a terrible life. You will become sick. The curse cannot be lifted. I have given over possession of your soul to the Devil to play with. You will probably die within a year of a horrible disease. Your evil will be punished. People will piss on your grave.

Ha ha aha ha ha ha ah ha ... you are doomed .. just for a stupid email .. ha ha

One thing about living in Caribbean, I learned about Obeah, the west African magic, and it adds cred to my email. They know all about Obeah.

I get a remarkable sense of satisfaction in jerking their chain, because I KNOW that culturally, they can't help worrying about an email like this.

SMS Spam Revenge Fantasies

I hate spam of any kind. I hate the Russians who think that my penis is too small and fill my inbox with ads for sex pills of all kinds. The worst kind of spam is text message or SMS spam. To me, because of its small 140 character format, SMS is sacrosanct as a method of communicating succinctly just with people who are important to me. When I get an SMS spam, I really get annoyed and all sorts of revenge fantasies enter my head.

My chief revenge fantasy is this. To find out what number and service is sending you the spam, go to the message options menu and check the SMS message details. The details include the mobile phone number of the message sender and the message centre number of the cellular service provider. Get the originating number.

I would set up my laptop as a server. In this blog you would find python code on how to send SMS from a server. I would then go to a public place that offered free internet. I would put the number into the code, and the message would be "Stop sending spam stupid, and yo mama is fat!" I would then put the send code in an endless loop, and go and order a latte and sip it slowly while my laptop churned away, eating their message credits up.

Of course I would never do this, because I need to have impeccable ethics to work for some of the people that I do. That is why this is a revenge fantasy only.

In the meantime, the next internet billionaire, is the guy who figures out how to stop spam at the source.