Annals of Spam

OK, explain to me this email:

God day,

How are you? My name is **. I came across your contact email at the University of Cyprus, Department of Economics. I seek for a private Economics teacher for my Daughter. I would like to know if you would be available for job.

If you would be available, kindly let me know your policy with regard to the fee, cancellations, location and make-up lessons. Also,get back to me with your area of specialization.

The lessons can start by 16th of June.

Thanks.

It seems too weird to be another one of those stupid experiments. But i can’t see the money-making potential. Maybe if I respond, they come back to me with the pitch? And what’s with Cyprus? Nothing makes sense here.

God day to you too!

P.S. It turns out there is a logic to the scam, as explained in the link given by commenter Scott. This sounds like a great future career track for Xian “Alex” Zhao and Monica Biernat—that is, once their family emergencies are done.

14 thoughts on “Annals of Spam

    • That’s my first thought, Email scams are a matter of scale — you have to to filter out the skeptical people as quickly as possible so as not to waste any more time on them. Cyprus is the new Nigeria.

      But then why target professors? Perhaps because their email addresses are easy to collect, and the scammers can use a slightly more targeted approach. Still, it’s weird to target highly educated people.

      • According to non-professorial staff I know at colleges, the venn diagram of “highly educated” people and “not very technologically/Internet savvy” people has very little overlap among the faculty.

      • I was amused by the following comment:

        “It won’t be pursued by anyone who consults sensible
        family or fiends, or who reads any of the advice banks and money transfer agencies make available.”

        “Fiends”? Was “Friends” meant? How does one find suitable fiends to consult? Or maybe this was intentional and ironic!

  1. I’m a music professor and I get emails like this all the time, purportedly wanting piano or music theory lessons. I do find them quite odd. But yeah, I suppose it’s just about prescreening people for gullibility. I find it creepier than ordinary spam because it’s a bit more targeted, however impersonally.

  2. Mike wrote: “it’s weird to target highly educated people.”

    See this interesting article about a physics professor at UNC Chapel Hill. The title is, “The Professor, the Bikini Model
    and the Suitcase Full of Trouble”, and the subtitle is, “A world-renowned physicist meets a gorgeous model online. They plan their perfect life together. But first, she asks, would he be so kind as to deliver a special package to her?” You can sort-of imagine the rest of the story just from this information. But it makes for a great read anyway:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/magazine/the-professor-the-bikini-model-and-the-suitcase-full-of-trouble.html

  3. I got one of these scams as well (in my case it was geared toward my job as a private guitar teacher). I decided to play along and after a while i received a cashiers check in the mail for $3000. Shortly after that, he emailed me saying he sent too much and requested I send $500 back to him so that the amount would be correct. The check (obviously) turned out to be a forgery.

    • Sounds like a delicious opportunity.

      Don’t deposit the check. Wait until the scammer sends the “Send $500 to fix the problem” message, and respond, “Oh, I just got the check and I haven’t had time to deposit it yet. I’ll just send it back to you and you can send me a check for the right amount.”

      Just wondering what the response would be.

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