New spam/scam trends for this summer knock out Victorian fiction

It looks like the golden age of hot, arousing, sex-related spam and scams is beginning to fade. What once seemed an incessant source of inspiration for luring the naive and avid of carnal pleasure into the realm of the on-line frauds now tends to dry.

Who or what is to be blamed for this dramatic change? The financial turmoil, an increasing tendency towards home and family reclusion, the rise in the appetite for safe sex (please read “no strings attached”) and several other ingredients have made spammers drop the badly, wanted, until recently, spam chicks. In their search for credibility, e-criminals have switched to abandoned and unhappy housewives and widows, longing to belong.

Is this a strategic shift towards an audience consisting of single, middle class men, “cubicle heroes” with a steady income and a chubby 401K in an age of recession? One can never tell. What’s sure is that unsolicited e-mails allegedly sent by single or divorced, young to middle-aged, educated and virtuous women looking for a “companion”, as in the example below, have begun to multiply.

Figure 1 – A purportedly innocent young Russian woman who “still believes in fairy tales” is now waiting “for the prince on a white horse” from…the USA.

Figure 2 – An allegedly respectable widow of a cocoa and coffee plantation owner from Cote d’Ivoire, without any offspring and suffering from cancer (and high blood pressure, mind you!) seeks soothing in charity and needs the recipient’s help to place the 10 million dollars her husband left her to be donated to orphanages.

My cynic advice – hit the Del key without remorse and send these messages into oblivion.

Safe surfing everybody!

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