Sunday, December 12, 2004

Phishing and other phunny things

If you're going to go phishing for people's credit info, you ought to at least be somewhat proficient in the English language. Here's part of a phraudulent phishing scam pretending to be from Paypal.

During our regular maintennance updates and procedures, we have reviewed all account informations that are securely stored on our database. Our staff have found accounts that needs to be updated in order to maintain the integrity of accounts. At this point, we require you to verify you account information by accessing you account.

This update must be done immediately in order for us to update your account information. Otherwise, we will temporarily block all access to your account until updates has been completed. (Emphasis mine, of course.)
It's probably a good thing they mangle the language; they phool phewer people that way. Enough of the "ph" thing. But one question: Why did they start calling that scam "phishing", anyway?

Other phunny funny things: Getting an 8-foot-tall and approximately 8-foot-wide Fraser Fir tree into the house, through a 3-foot-wide door. Getting tree up into the stand, with four kids standing around indicating if it's leaning left, right, forward, or back. Getting tree to stay upright in stand without falling over (hint: attach cuphook to baseboard behind tree; use guy wire). Discovering the next morning that tree isn't drinking any water. Discussing whether tree should be removed from stand, dripping water and sap over carpet, then re-cut at the base and re-inserted into tree stand, repeating above steps re: four kids indicating whether tree is leaning, etc.

Now that's hilarious, especially before a second cup of coffee.

After the second cup, we determined that the tree was, too, drinking; it must have sucked up at least a pint overnight. Good enough.

More later... laptop battery is beeping.

2 comments:

Mark Daniels said...

Several years ago, shortly after we'd first gone online at my house, I received a similarly mangled missive from someone trying to gain access to my ISP account information. Even had I been credulous enough to buy their scam, the misspellings and grammatical errors were dead giveaways.

I wrote a short response:

"Your dishonesty is only exceeded by your illiteracy."

I doubt that the person to whom it was addressed understood the message, though.

Attila said...

The sad thing is that so many Americans can't spell and don't care that these might be American high school graduates.