Without a Traceroute

I received the following throughly entertaining spam email yesterday:

Ref. Number: NM/BC921245/KY17
STAATS LOTERIJ HEADQUARTERS
Lotto Winner of 1,000,000.00 Euros
Ticket number: 46939
ELECTRONIC MAIL AWARD WINNING NOTIFICATION

CONGRATULATIONS!!!

We are pleased to inform you of the announcement of the winners of the STAATS LOTTERY POGRAMS
held on 13th January 2009.Your Company or your personal e-mail address is attached to winning number
ticket number: 46949 with Batch number NM/207361/WOP drew the lucky numbers 887-13-865-39-10-83,
and consequently won in the first lottery category. You have therefore been approved for a lump sum pay
out of One Million EUROS (1,000,000.00) in cash credited to file REF NO: NL/BC7765468/WJ14 and Ticket
number: 46949.

This is from total prize money of 10,000,000.00 Million Euros, shared among the Ten international winners in
this category.All participants were selected through our Microsoft computer ballot system drawn from 21,000
names, 3,000 names from each continent, as part of International “E-MAIL” Promotions Program, which is
conducted once in everyfour years for our prominent MS WORD user all over the world,and for the
continuos use of E-mail.

Your fund has been deposited in an escrow account with our affiliate Bank here in NETHERLAND, and
insured with your REF NO: NM/BC921245/KY17 and your E-mail address. You are to keep your ref. number
and Ticket number from the public, until you have been processed and your money remitted to your
personal account.We hope with your prize, you will be happy to promote the use of E-mail and the use of
MS WORD. To claim your winning prize, you must first contact the claims department by email or call for
processing and remittance of your prize money to you. Your assigned claims Director contact is:

MR.ROBERT ANDERSON
TEL/FAX: +31-847-308-238.
Email:sttslotagtrobertanderson@gmail.com

He is to help you in claiming your due prize. Remember, all prize money must be claimed not later than the
31st January, 2009. All funds not claimed on or before the fixed date will be penalized accordingly. NOTE:
In order to avoid unnecessary delays and complications, please remember to quote your reference and ticket
numbers in all correspondences with your claims director. All response should be sent to
sttslotagtrobertanderson@gmail.com

Sincerely,
Mrs.Bonita Larron
For STAATS LOTTERY, NETHERLANDS.

There are so many funny things about this spam that I almost thought it was a joke when I first read it. First off, I’m so happy that my status as a “prominent MS WORD user all over the world,” and my
“continuos use of E-mail,” have finally paid off (especially considering I haven’t used Word in months). Also, it’s particularly ironic that the winners were chosen “through our Microsoft computer ballot system,” since they obviously scraped my email address from my website about free software. I’m not wild about Microsoft, but if they really were giving me a million euro I probably would “be happy to promote the use of E-mail and the use of MS WORD.”

Whoever’s writing this email also has a little bit of trouble with math. Their figure for the total prize money, “10,000,000.00 Million Euros” works out to 10 trillion euro (10 million millions). For reference, the 2007 GDP of the entire EU was around 14.43 trillion USD, or about 11 trillion euro. So I may not be impressed with their math skills, but I am impressed with their ability to give away 90% of the GDP of the European Union as prize money.

I am glad I’m one of the winners of the “STAATS LOTTERY POGRAMS” because being on the losing end of a pogrom would certainly suck. It’s also pretty funny that for somebody that claims to be based in the Netherlands, they write in really bad English instead of fluent Dutch (or, really, fluent English).

I’ve been trying to decide what the funniest way to mess with these people would be. I could just sign their email address up for a bunch of spam, but that’s not that creative. I kind of want to try calling the phone number they listed, but that might be expensive.

I’m thinking the best is to email them back, pretend to be very gullible, and string them along for as long as possible to waste their time/amuse myself. The only problem is I’d rather not use my real email to reply, because it’ll just invite more spam. I’ll probably have to change the “reference numbers,” too. If they’re smart, they have some sort of database of what number they spammed to each email address, and they’ll know I’m just messing with them. Based on the quality of the email, though, I’m going to assume they’re not that bright.

Also, if you enjoy laughing at spam, I highly recommend Spamusement (from which I half-stole the title of this post).