Illiterate spam



  •  Some times I really, really wonder if anyone actually ever falls for this kind of scams.

     
            </p><p>Greetings!<br><br>When you take to the skies astride a blazing, 
            eagle-winged lion, your comrades will know you mean business. 
            Serious business. So saddle up, because this flying mount will 
            travel as fast as your riding skill will take you, and it can even 
            travel at 310% speed if you have at least one other 310% speed 
            mount. (<i>this was probably taken from the official press release or something)</i><br></p><p>Once activated, this World of Warcraft in-game pet key applies to 
            all present and future characters on a single World of Warcraft 
            license. </p>
            <p>we will be complimentary seat to the 5,000 players. You can log 
            Web site application, we will be lucky players randomly. (<i>wut? what does that even mean?)</i><br>Please 
            click this link to apply</p>
            <p><a>[seemingly valid link]</a><br><br>If your account passes the check successfully, we will 
            send a code for the Winged Guardian flying mount to you in the form 
            of e-mail.<br></p>
            <p>The World of Warcraft Support Team<br><font color="#888888">Blizzard Entertainment </font></p><p></blockquote> </p><p>The link actually points to:</p><p>hxxp://us.battle.net<span style="font-weight: bold;">.support.worldofwaircraft.tk</span>/login.asp?ref=https%3A%2F%2Fus.battle.net%2Faccount%2Fmanagement%2Findex.xml&amp;app=bam </p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Seriously... what kind of brain damage must you have to even start considering clicking that link? <br></p>


  • @pbean said:

    Seriously... what kind of brain damage must you have to even start considering clicking that link?
     

    Information you left out: whether the link was literally like than in the message or camouflaged with words like "Click here to log in"

    Most people don't understand URLs.

    These people do not have brain damage.

     

    I hereby officially and correctly deflect the WTF back onto you.




  • This probably would have never made it to the inbox of any of my email accounts.  And if it did, the link would not have been clickable.



  • @frits said:

    This probably would have never made it to the inbox of any of my email accounts.  And if it did, the link would not have been clickable.
    My DNS would have blocked it even if clicked.



  • I see your spam and raise you this I received some days ago, verbatim, for some reason there is no link....

    Dear [firstname],

    I've been trying to reach you to provide some valuable

    information on working from home:

    <FONT color=#0000cc>Click Here Free Report</FONT>


    To Your Success>>>



  • @pbean said:

    Seriously... what kind of brain damage must you have to even start considering clicking that link?

    A minor case of serious brain damage.



  •  My favorite phishing attempt was an email I got from someone claiming to be from the US Treasury, wherein the word "deposit" was spelled with a "k".



  • @ShatteredArm said:

    My favorite phishing attempt was an email I got from someone claiming to be from the US Treasury, wherein the word "deposit" was spelled with a "k".
     

    ...what? How? I can't even think of anywhere a K would make sense as a typo in the word "deposit", unless it was replacing the I or the O by being adjacent on a QWERTY keyboard...

     



  • @pbean said:

    When you take to the skies astride a blazing, eagle-winged lion, your comrades will know you mean business.
    This was even funnier before I got to the mention of World of Warcraft in the second paragraph.

     



  • @ShatteredArm said:

     My favorite phishing attempt was an email I got from someone claiming to be from the US Treasury, wherein the word "deposit" was spelled with a "k".

    Obligatory Red Dwarf:

    Lister: "How did you know I filled it out?"
    Kryten: "Because you're the only one who spells 'thursday' with an F."



  •  @Mason Wheeler said:

    @ShatteredArm said:
    My favorite phishing attempt was an email I got from someone claiming to be from the US Treasury, wherein the word "deposit" was spelled with a "k".
     

    ...what? How? I can't even think of anywhere a K would make sense as a typo in the word "deposit", unless it was replacing the I or the O by being adjacent on a QWERTY keyboard...

    The first house I ever bought was on East Broad Street, but a typo at the bank resulted in the address being entered as Wast Broad Street.  Note that "w" and "e" are next to each other on a QWERTY keyboard.  This turned out to be a problem whenever the bank tried to send me mail because the Post Office would see "Wast" and assume that it was really supposed to be "West" and return the mail to the sender as undeliverable because there is no such address on West Broad Street.

     

     



  • @El_Heffe said:

     @Mason Wheeler said:

    @ShatteredArm said:
    My favorite phishing attempt was an email I got from someone claiming to be from the US Treasury, wherein the word "deposit" was spelled with a "k".
     

    ...what? How? I can't even think of anywhere a K would make sense as a typo in the word "deposit", unless it was replacing the I or the O by being adjacent on a QWERTY keyboard...

    The first house I ever bought was on East Broad Street, but a typo at the bank resulted in the address being entered as Wast Broad Street.  Note that "w" and "e" are next to each other on a QWERTY keyboard.  This turned out to be a problem whenever the bank tried to send me mail because the Post Office would assume that Wast was really supposed to be West and return the mail to the sender as undeliverable because there is no such address on West Broad Street.

    OK, obvious question time.  Why couldn't you get the bank to change it?

    I used to be at apartment #110, but Verizon got the number wrong and tried to send all my mail to #101.  (Somehow the line got hooked up at the right place, though.  Go figure.)   A few phone calls was all it took to get that straightened out.

     



  • @Mason Wheeler said:

    OK, obvious question time.  Why couldn't you get the bank to change it?
    I actually tried a couple of times, but nobody could seem to grasp the concept that "Wast" was a misspelling of "East" not a misspelling of "West".   I eventually got it corrected, but by then interest rates had dropped quite a bit and I refinanced with a different bank who got the address right the first time.



  • @El_Heffe said:

    @Mason Wheeler said:

    OK, obvious question time.  Why couldn't you get the bank to change it?
    I actually tried a couple of times, but nobody could seem to grasp the concept that "Wast" was a misspelling of "East" not a misspelling of "West".   I eventually got it corrected, but by then interest rates had dropped quite a bit and I refinanced with a different bank who got the address right the first time.

     

    It's always bothered me when I see local commercials on one of the Spanish stations that "Este" (East) and "Oeste" (West) differ only by one letter.  Surely that's got to cause trouble when you address things in block capitals like the USPS wants you to.

     



  • @pbean said:

    The link actually points to:

    hxxp://us.battle.net.support.worldofwaircraft.tk/login.asp?ref=https%3A%2F%2Fus.battle.net%2Faccount%2Fmanagement%2Findex.xml&app=bam

     

     

    TRWTF is that page doesn't even load properly for me. No images or CSS. Even people who don't understand URLs would notice that.

    Edit: Of course, it could be that FIrefox blocks them because it's a reported forgery, which is a WTF since it already told me it was a reported forgery, and I already agreed to see it anyway.

     



  • @immibis said:

    @pbean said:

    The link actually points to:

    hxxp://us.battle.net.support.worldofwaircraft.tk/login.asp?ref=https%3A%2F%2Fus.battle.net%2Faccount%2Fmanagement%2Findex.xml&app=bam

     

     

    TRWTF is that page doesn't even load properly for me. No images or CSS. Even people who don't understand URLs would notice that.

    Edit: Of course, it could be that FIrefox blocks them because it's a reported forgery, which is a WTF since it already told me it was a reported forgery, and I already agreed to see it anyway.

     

    The email notification for this post actually went to my spam filter.  When I opened it, the email client displayed a big red phishing warning.  I guess that would be meta-not-a-WTF.



  • @Mason Wheeler said:

    I used to be at apartment #110, but Verizon got the number wrong and tried to send all my mail to #101.
     

    I live at #19. When we moved in I organised the electricity, etc. When we didn't get a bill for six months I tried to chase them up and they kept assuring us everything was fine. Eventually they asked for the meter numbers: turned out #29 has been paying our bill. They eventually sent us a bill (for the 7-8 months - presumably #29 got a refund/credit for their overpayments). But that bill and several subsequent bills continued to say "for supply at 29 [streetname]".

    As an aside, we left that company, went to another one for a discount, the first one then said they'd pay the contract break fee AND give a (slightly) better discount, so we accepted. Then they didn't honour that discount, so we went back to the other company, who then waived the contract break fee. Net result: a free $90 (applied as a credit to the first company's final bill). Of course now the first company has bought out the second one so we are back where we started. :-/

     @Mason Wheeler said:

    A few phone calls was all it took to get that straightened out.

    A "few" was "all" it took? These sorts of things should only take one call, but I know full well it is never that simple.



  • @Zemm said:

    I live at #19. When we moved in I organised the electricity, etc. When we didn't get a bill for six months I tried to chase them up and they kept assuring us everything was fine. Eventually they asked for the meter numbers: turned out #29 has been paying our bill. They eventually sent us a bill (for the 7-8 months - presumably #29 got a refund/credit for their overpayments). But that bill and several subsequent bills continued to say "for supply at 29 [streetname]".
     

    When I first started using online bill paying, my bank had a few little "features" they didn't bother telling their customers about.  One, which was likely designed to normalize their database, involved "correcting" slight variations in payee information.  If you listed "XYZ Bank & Trust" at a certain address, and they already had an entry for "XY&Z Bank and Trust" at the same address, they'd pick one and roll them together.  Major banks and corporations had standard sets of info, while smaller companies or individual payees could be added on the fly, subject to such corrections, with the bill-pay bank printing checks and snail-mailing them.

    Dues for my homeowners' association went to the property management company, with the payee given as the name of the specific property.  I don't know how many properties that management company was accepting payments for, but mine, "Villa Montego Townhomes", was similar enough in the eyes of the bank's software to "Village Fairway Gardens" that it was assumed to be the same thing (apparently "similar" means "starts with the same three letters").  And since the address was that of the management company, that was enough for all my payments to get sent with the name of the wrong property (but my lot/account number).  After straightening it out with both bank and management company, they somehow arranged to reproduce the same error about three months later, at which time I had to go through the whole mishegoss again.

    (We won't even get into the business of sending electronic payments three days after the requested date, even on recurring monthly payments set up months earlier to take place on the same day of each month.)


  • Garbage Person

    @da Doctah said:

    When I first started using online bill paying, my bank had a few little "features" they didn't bother telling their customers about.
    And this is why I pay my bills directly with the biller, thank you very much. If they don't accept online payments directly, they can certainly pay someone to read the chicken scratch on my hand-written checks. I consider it a "your business procedures are a decade out of date, fix it" tax. Lo and behold, it seems to work.

     I think I've used a grand total of 13 checks out of the original pack my credit union gave me when I signed up at age 16. Three of those have gone to my University (two to tuition before they stopped charging a fucking fee for online payment, and one to a loan before they started accepting online payments for those), two to courts for traffic tickets (neither of those jurisdictions accepted online payments - a third did, however), three to my father for some junk I bought off him, one to an uncle for some other junk, one to a business partner, one to a girlfriend (wtf?), and the other two to my racing team (the series just started taking online payments this season). So that's 8 to private citizens, 3 to businesses and 2 to governments. I have NEVER had the bank mail anybody a check for me - the only check I've had them write was a cashier's check to buy a damned car.

    So for the past ten years of my life, I've needed thirteen checks. This book of checks has 135 of them in it. The number of places that don't take online payments is dwindling. Hell, not only can I pay my race series bill online, I can pay my team directly now - even with a credit card! Because Paypal rules. Sometimes. Even if the rate at which I need the damned things stays constant, it'll take me one fucking hundred years to get through them all. In short, tell your wankassed homeowners association's management company to grow the fuck up and start acting like the business that it really is. And then park a rusted out 1965 Impala in your yard.



  • Every time I read about foreign banks and payments, I have to go and check what decade the message is from. Here, cheques have disappeared for all practical purposes some 15 years ago (banks stopped giving guarantee, which resulted in nobody accepting them anymore) - they were replaced with cards. I set up direct debit for my recurring bills in the webbank, and the one-off stuff is paid through the webbank, too (this includes any payment to an individual). If I set the payment to be done on n-th day of m-th month (assuming it's a weekday and not a holiday), the payment will be done that day. Payments within the country made during business hours are processed in almost real time (used to be in real time at any time of the day, on any day, but this had to be crippled when we joined the eurozone), payments abroad are always processed the next business day. There's no processing fees when using the online services.



  • Yeah, America is very much the opposite of Europe in this regard.

    Here, processing checks takes some crazy fees, and is very rare, and direct transfers between accounts are free (or very cheap, if you didn't change your bank to one that does it for free yet.)

    In the States, trasnfers cost some absurd sums, from what I heard, and are nearly unheard of, instead you exchange checks.



    Also, Americans pay for incoming calls to their cellphones. I think last time it happened here was in the mid-90s in the analog NMT450 network, all the GSM ones are the way it should be, incoming calls free, unless you're roaming abroad.

    In this country, we have an X.25-based, still supporting dialup and floppies as media, in addition to networking, and, amazingly, working correctly, system operated by an external entity that banks use to exchange in-country transfers. Each bank uplods data three times a day ad specified time slot, and downloads it three times a day at other timeslot. So depending on whether the target bank will download after yours uploaded or not, it may be today or NBD. Same-bank transfers are usually immediate, tho a few are still retarded enough to run their internal systems only in business hours.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @bannedfromcoding said:

    In the States, trasnfers cost some absurd sums, from what I heard, and are nearly unheard of, instead you exchange checks.

    I've never seen any such fees.

    @bannedfromcoding said:

    Also, Americans pay for incoming calls to their cellphones.

    We pay for the time we use our phones, although depending on the carrier, all in-network (or maybe a defined list of numbers) calls are not charged against your minutes. Of course, this also means that there are no additional charges when you want to call a cell phone.



  • Checks are the worst thing ever.

    Not so long ago a check I received bounced almost three weeks after I cashed it, so the bank took the money back from my account. I called them and asked how I could tell when a check has cleared. They told me that if it does not bounce in 2 or 3 weeks it is likely to be ok. I asked if there was a way to know for sure, and they explained that unless it was a check from the same bank or a certified check there is no way to know.

    I don't accept checks anymore (except from my grandmother at Christmas).



  • @thistooshallpass said:

    I called them and asked how I could tell when a check has cleared. They told me that if it does not bounce in 2 or 3 weeks it is likely to be ok. I asked if there was a way to know for sure, and they explained that unless it was a check from the same bank or a certified check there is no way to know.
     

    Wait, so how did you think checks worked if you weren't aware of this?



  • @locallunatic said:

    @thistooshallpass said:

    I called them and asked how I could tell when a check has cleared. They told me that if it does not bounce in 2 or 3 weeks it is likely to be ok. I asked if there was a way to know for sure, and they explained that unless it was a check from the same bank or a certified check there is no way to know.
     

    Wait, so how did you think checks worked if you weren't aware of this?

    Well I was thinking that it was like other payment methods - once bank A confirmed to bank B that the check was clear, there would be a notification or a flag somewhere. But really there isn't, there is a communication only when the check is denied, which sucks.

    I would not mind having to wait 3-4 weeks until my bank can say: ok, we had a confirmation and this check is good. But as it is, the only thing I can do is wait to see if it bounces, and if not, hope that it won't bounce later.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @locallunatic said:

    @thistooshallpass said:

    I called them and asked how I could tell when a check has cleared. They told me that if it does not bounce in 2 or 3 weeks it is likely to be ok. I asked if there was a way to know for sure, and they explained that unless it was a check from the same bank or a certified check there is no way to know.
     

    Wait, so how did you think checks worked if you weren't aware of this?

    Like the UK (before they decided to try and get rid of them) whereby if it's not bounced by (working) day 6, then it won't bounce?


  • Garbage Person

     @locallunatic said:

    Wait, so how did you think checks worked if you weren't aware of this?
    Well, a lot of the more reasonable US banks have figured out that processing checks in the traditional "mail the thing to the issuing bank and receive money later" method is a fucking waste of their time. Since the check constitutes permission to withdraw funds from an account, they'll take the check and initiate an EFT instead. They still have to provide the check to the issuing bank, but they can clear the transaction MUCH more quickly.



  • @PJH said:

    Like the UK (before they decided to try and get rid of them) whereby if it's not bounced by (working) day 6, then it won't bounce?
     

    When did that rule first get put in?  Seems like a quick turn around like that would be problematic back in olden times (of course maintaining backwards compatibility to olden times is why the US doesn't do this).


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @locallunatic said:

    @PJH said:

    Like the UK (before they decided to try and get rid of them) whereby if it's not bounced by (working) day 6, then it won't bounce?
     

    When did that rule first get put in? 

    Nov 2007



  • @PJH said:

    Like the UK (before they decided to try and get rid of them) whereby if it's not bounced by (working) day 6, then it won't bounce?
    This is a common problem in the U.S.  You will never get a bank to give you a straight answer about how long it takes for a check to officially clear and reach a point where it cannot bounce.  In actual practice, if the bank cannot get its money, at any time, for any reason, the check will bounce regardless of how long it has been and regardless of having previously told you that the check has cleared.  In this day and age there is absolutely no excuse for not being able to determine the status of a check, with absolute certainty, within a few days.



  • @El_Heffe said:

    @PJH said:

    Like the UK (before they decided to try and get rid of them) whereby if it's not bounced by (working) day 6, then it won't bounce?
    This is a common problem in the U.S.  You will never get a bank to give you a straight answer about how long it takes for a check to officially clear and reach a point where it cannot bounce.  In actual practice, if the bank cannot get its money, at any time, for any reason, the check will bounce regardless of how long it has been and regardless of having previously told you that the check has cleared.  In this day and age there is absolutely no excuse for not being able to determine the status of a check, with absolute certainty, within a few days.

    This is a bit off-topic but I have a friend that works in a bank's mail-processing facility, and these places are incredible. They have huge machines that open letters, separate the checks from whatever other document was included and route them on a different treadmill for further processing. Those machines even deal with staples and stuff like that. It's not like robots with arms or anything, I don't understand exactly how they works, it's like a maze of threadmills and hooks. Awesome.



  • @thistooshallpass said:

    it's like a maze of threadmills and hooks. Awesome.
     

    Perhaps the Rube Goldberg technology is holding them back..


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @dhromed said:

    Perhaps the Rube Goldberg technology is holding them back..

    No, it's totally the way of the future. He was a visionary. Don't you guys have shows like How It's Made over there? They've taught me that nearly everything today is made in a giant Rube Golbergian nightmare of awesomeness.



  • @boomzilla said:

    Don't you guys have shows like How It's Made over there? They've taught me that nearly everything today is made in a giant Rube Golbergian nightmare of awesomeness.
     

    I know it, and I totally approve of that show and of the machines portrayed therein.

    I don't approve of explicitly supporting a paper system that can be done better with electronics.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @dhromed said:

    I don't approve of explicitly supporting a paper system that can be done better with electronics.

    That's fair. Though the banks are trying to get themselves out of the paper shuffling business as much as possible. But I guess old habits die hard. I'd be shocked if my household writes more than 1 or 2 paper checks a year. I don't even know where my check book is.

    A few years ago, the Federal Reserve made some efforts to modernize even paper check handling, called Check 21. I couldn't say how well this works, since in addition to not writing checks, I don't get very many, either. Another issue used to be checks from "out of town" banks. There's been a lot of consolidation, and the Check 21 stuff, and I suppose IT in general have helped get rid of a lot of those problems.

    When I moved from California to Virginia in 2001, Bank of America had only recently (through a merger) started operating on the east coast. For several years, I couldn't even deposit checks at the ATM (PITA while waiting for direct deposit to go through).



  • Not sure how many WTF readers are married. In the US at least, that's one place that writing checks is unavoidable, at least if you have a lot of small businesses you're using as vendors.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @cmccormick said:

    Not sure how many WTF readers are married. In the US at least, that's one place that writing checks is unavoidable, at least if you have a lot of small businesses you're using as vendors.

    I agree that businesses probably write more checks than most people do. But marriage? Could you connect the dots, please.



  • @boomzilla said:

    @cmccormick said:
    Not sure how many WTF readers are married. In the US at least, that's one place that writing checks is unavoidable, at least if you have a lot of small businesses you're using as vendors.

    I agree that businesses probably write more checks than most people do. But marriage? Could you connect the dots, please.

    I've been married for almost four years and have only written one cheque since! That was paying for my son's birth certificate; before that only eight cheques - all related to my small business. But then I don't live in a backward country. ;-)


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Zemm said:

    But then I don't live in a backward country.

    How can you say that when the water doesn't even spin in the right direction when you flush the toilet?!



  • @boomzilla said:

    How can you say that when the water doesn't even spin in the right direction when you flush the toilet?!

    Your toilet water spins? With 100mm pipes the water pretty much goes straight down. And what is the right direction anyway? Googling seems to be inconsistent: some pages say clockwise, others anti-clockwise.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Zemm said:

    @boomzilla said:
    How can you say that when the water doesn't even spin in the right direction when you flush the toilet?!

    Your toilet water spins? With 100mm pipes the water pretty much goes straight down. And what is the right direction anyway? Googling seems to be inconsistent: some pages say clockwise, others anti-clockwise.

    You're not actually questioning Something Everybody Knows, are you? Backwards, indeed!



  • @Zemm said:

    I've been married for almost four years and have only written one cheque since! That was paying for my son's birth certificate; before that only eight cheques - all related to my small business. But then I don't live in a backward country. ;-)
    I've been married for nearly fifteen years, and while I've written many more cheques than Zemm, it's fairly rare that we would use one these days. Certainly all our routine bills are paid online (I ♥ BPay - 10 minutes on the computer each fortnight and I can pay our home loan, credit cards and all our bills) - except for our newspaper delivery service, for which we drop around to the agent every few months and chuck them $20 or so. Sometimes it is more convenient to give someone a cheque on the day than to get them to send you a bill, particularly if it's for something expensive (so you don't want to carry the cash around) or unexpected (so you didn't have a chance to get to the bank beforehand). Even so, we'd probably only write one or two a year.

    When we were first married we did write cheques much more often - for rent, for instance, though sometimes we just paid cash. But back then I was being paid by cheque too. Direct deposit of salary certainly makes things much easier. When I was being paid by the university, I'd deposit the cheques at the same branch they were drawn on so they could be cleared immediately. Despite this, sometimes they would be deposited as cleared funds and sometimes they would not, so I never knew whether I was going to be able to get the money straight away.



  • @boomzilla said:

    @Zemm said:
    @boomzilla said:
    How can you say that when the water doesn't even spin in the right direction when you flush the toilet?!

    Your toilet water spins? With 100mm pipes the water pretty much goes straight down. And what is the right direction anyway? Googling seems to be inconsistent: some pages say clockwise, others anti-clockwise.

    You're not actually questioning Something Everybody Knows, are you? Backwards, indeed!

    I have videoed my toilet flushing. Is that forward enough for you?



  • @Zemm said:

    I have videoed my toilet flushing. Is that forward enough for you?
     

    :|

     

    You're a Flushie.


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