Spam Sucess Stories Revisited!

Thank you readers for responding to our request for true life spam success stories. We were literally deluged with your letters of concern and condolence. However, we were hoping for emails of what happened when you replied to internet spam. A couple of you managed to stay on topic so here goes:

Have you ever responded to "Hot Girls" who may "Want to Meet You", and actually met them?

Dear GTT:
I have responded to numerous solicitations to “Meet Hot Girls”, and it has mostly turned out great. The women in question tend to be surprisingly happy to meet me and I have had lots of relations with a variety of highly attractive ladies, very few of whom have later appeared on talk shows. I hide my indiscretions from my wife by telling her I am golfing (I am pretty good) so she has remained more or less blissfully ignorant. That is, until recently when she went a little Babe Ruth on my whip. But I am not too worried. I am a pretty focused person who can usually accomplish whatever task I set my mind to. I am still working out all the angles on this particular issue, but I am confident I can knock this one back onto the green. Or at least continue to see my kids. Maybe on weekends. So, again, not saying it’s totally consequence free, but overall, pretty happy with the whole “Hot Girls Want To Meet You” thing.
Yours, T



Ever gotten free stuff in response to a spam e-mail? Tell us about it.

It sounds too good to be true, but all I had to do was type my credit card numbers, SS# and address into this website: https://www.eswearthisisntas.cam
It turns out I had the winning numbers so now I will be receiving free Viagra and free Breast Enhancement Cream! Seems a little redundant doesn’t it?
-John Q. Gullible


If you are making $100-$200 a day from your home, please let us know how that's going and what you actually do?

It’s true! I make at least this much every day without leaving the comfort of my bedroom, or sometimes my boyfriend drops me off at a motel.
-Peaches


Gotten money from Bill Gates for buying a Windows product? or gotten a free vacation? or gotten to test and keep (for free) the latest in electronic gadgetry?

Dear Unwashed Masses,
Please, please stop emailing me about this. I mean really…stop it. I know that I am a little smarter than most people, but how dumb do you have to be? Yet my inbox is clogged every single morning! I have to change my MSN address like twice a week. It is really getting to be a problem. So let me put this out there: don’t ever respond to any internet promotion containing the words “Bill", "Gates" and "Free”. Please. In fact, unless you are my wife, my girlfriend, my accountant or CEO of a company named after a piece of fruit, then you can feel confident that I don’t want to hear from you. Really. I mean it! Thanks.
-W. Gates


Has anyone ever been generously given a winning a lottery ticket or been sent money from a dead relative that you didn't know existed? What are you doing with your millions?

To Whom Is Concerned,
This has all happened to me many times over and some more! You will be happy to meet my positive experiences with TrustTrueNexTechHappyCatCo. The corporation formerly known as TrustTrueNexTechHappyCatCo is the best place for giving them and us your money. TrustTrueNexTechHappyCatCo will invest your savings of life in a diversified portfolio of opportunities and risk-chances that could see one or the other of us rich! rIch! RIICh! rR1Ch!!!!! RICH.rtf
-Charles Dickens
Lagos, Nigeria

The Face of Spam

Thank you readers for your wonderful submissions of Spam success stories. This is a follow up to El Capitan's printing of your responses.

Since I asked our readers their experience with Spam. I thought I would do some follow up and really investigate this issue. So I set my sights on the Spam King, and the Can-Spam law. Did you know that 80% of Spam is sent by only 135 people? They may be small in number, but powerful in deed. (of course I'm not sure this limited to the US or World Wide.) So I'm not sure if there are 135 Spam Kings in the U.S. or in the whole world. either way this fits Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point theory that a small number of people are involved in most of the real action.

The official definition of illegal Spamming is sending e-mails from other people's accounts, usually by means of a virus or an unsecure network, crafting messages to disguise the origin, falsifying the headers, or creating five or more e-mail accounts with fake names or five IP addresses and spamming from them.

So if you want to avoid the CAN-SPAM Act, four is the golden number for your Spam operation.*
Four e-mail accounts and four IP addresses. Of course if you limit yourself to four, you probably won't be sending billions of Spam e-mails or making $18,000 (a year in US dollars).
(from http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/security-bytes/japanese-spam-king-arrested/)

Not all Spammers that get caught, are just your basic white collar criminals.

for a morbid and somber Spam King story: see.
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/jul/24/20080725_C6LO_BENNETT/

On that, Spam is just a slight hiccup when considering the positives of new technology.

Thank you, Internet for we take the good with the bad, allowing us to gain inheritance from dead relatives we never knew we had or helping out a stranger with a winning lottery ticket. Thank you for the free stuff. Free Porn. Which in my opinion has completed screwed up a generation of young men. Free news articles (so we can help the newspapers go out of business, and force alcoholic journalists to find a job that pays more so that don't have as much to gripe about when they go to a bar).

So Thank you, Al Gore. (j/k). Really, thank you Bill Joy and others lucky to be born in 1954-1956, nerdy, and willing to forgo sex with hot co-eds in the seventies (when everyone was just giving it away), to put in over 10,000 hours of programming (in front of awfully slow computers) to make the internet what it is today.

I might be wrong about the sex, I'm basing my judgment solely on my impression of computer "geeks" from 80s movies, like "Revenge of the Nerds." Well, maybe the computer guys weren't forgoing sex. Perhaps, in the seventies there was true equality, and even computer nerds got laid... (just during the day, when they were not programming.)

*Four besides being the ideal number for Spammers is also the number of wives you can have in Muslim culture (definitely the biggest draw in converting to Islam... at least for guys.) of course you have to wake up at dawn, pray throughout the day, live with people that only know the Koran and nothing else, rely on handouts from people that sell oil and might have to kill your daughter if she doesn't wear the right clothing, gets raped, has sex or even just goes on "dates" without your consent.

and I'm not even mentioning that you have to live and submit to the rules of completely nuts, power hungry undeserving dogmatic and delusional fellow Muslims. They might be using Russian (Soviet Union) or US made arms to intimidate or kill you, because they see you as a rival, you forgot to follow one of the Islam's rules or they were just having a bad day.

but you get four wives! tough call. maybe there are many Muslim men out there, completely reasonable citizens of the world: for peace, conserving the environment, social justice, educating the young, that just going along with the fanatical religion thing, oppressive government, etc. because they have four hot or at worse still attractive wives (at the same time). and they know that with all our freedoms, in the United States, you get in trouble if you have more than one wife (at a time).

or you could live in the Muslim world for a few years get married (four times) and move to GB (Great Britain). Do you think they have just one bride per wedding at a time? or do they sometimes double or triple-team it, or even go for the whole shebang all at once?

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/columnists/fergus_shanahan/790620/Columnist-Fergus-Shanahan-Bed-hoppers-are-screwing-us-all.html

Peace out.
GCNOF.

RIP Frank McCourt

I just realized Frank McCourt passed away this year. July 19, 2009. I wondered if I missed it at the time or just forgot? It was the weekend of my Tahoe Swim Relay.

I read his ob piece in the New York Times.

here it is...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/books/20mccourt.html

I enjoyed his books tremendously. I read all three. Angela's Ashes, 'Tis, and Teacher Man.
If I ever write a memoir it will be because of him. (ok, a little melodramatic; exaggerated.)
I also like how he writes about his teaching. To McCourt! If you haven't read his work you're missing out. No one does childhood or adult life, quite like the Irish. And McCourt captures it beautifully and memorably.

And remember to share with us at Georgetown Tales, your Spam stories. (Georgetown Tales is not liable for any harm to persons, possessions or computers, resulting from investigations into your Spam e-mail. You do that at your own risk. We especially caution against traveling to Nigeria to gain inheritance or to attend funeral proceedings for dead relatives [that are not on your family tree]). Nonetheless, we relish in hearing your stories.