No chance spam

Hearing voices

By Greg Adams, Auckland | Thursday, 22 September 2011
I received this in my inbox the other day.

“Om ervoor te zorgen uw bescherming, hebben we nu uitgeschakeld toegang tot uw rekeningen. U moet nu opnieuw instellen uw veiligheid. U zult niet in staat zijn om toegang tot uw rekeningen te krijgen totdat je dit hebt gedaan.”

Huh?

But wait, there was more.

“Informatie — Als u uw toegangscode niet binnengaan van uw willekeurige kaartlezer of uw Rabo-kaart te verwijderen uit de Random Reader apparaat na verificatie vriendelijk geduldig te zijn voor 15 tot 20 minuten kunnen we dan controleren of uw gegevens kunt u uw rekening.”

“Onze excuses voor het ongemak. Om te beginnen de reactivering proces, gelieve de verwijzing onderstaande link te zien. Klikken hier.”

Now, it may make perfect sense if you’re a Dutch speaker. But I’m not.

“Important message from Kiwibank” said the subject in the email. Ah, at least it was in English, but I’m not one of those either (a Kiwibank customer, that is).

However, the message doesn’t actually mention Kiwibank. Instead it’s a message for Rabobank. And, yes you’ve guessed it, I’m not a Rabobank customer.

I also took the liberty of translating it, and it says something almost quite real.

“To look your protection, we have now eliminated access to your accounts. You must establish your security now again. You not able will be access to your accounts get until you have done this. Blah, blahdy, blah. ” Or words to that effect.

Basically, it’s the usual nonsense and, all in all, not a very convincing email.

I know that spam works by the ‘if-we-send-out enough-someone-will-reply’ scattergun approach, as opposed to the surgical precision of sending a pesonalised email to an invidual you actually know. But surely there’s a ‘Spamming 101’ guidebook that tries to narrow these things down a little.

Dutch, for example, has about 22 million native speakers. Even if you add in the five million or so Afrikaans speakers, that’s only 27 million. In July, the United States Census Bureau estimated there were 6.94 billion people in the world. If you’re sending out spam willy-nilly, that’s a 0.389 per cent chance of randomly stumbling across a Dutch speaker. Clearly, not great odds.

The likelihood of a response would greatly improve for, say, Mandarin — nearly one in seven people speak it. Depending on your statistical source of choice, Spanish has about 400 million native speakers and English 350-odd million, rising to some 1.5 billion if you take into account second languages and EFL. All better options than Dutch, I’d have thought.

You don’t need to do the maths to know there are even fewer Kiwibank customers around the world. And the number of Rabobank customers who think they’re with Kiwibank must be even less – unless, of course, there’s a new party drug I’ve not heard of.

Surely spammers want to give themselves at least a slim chance of getting some schmuck to reply.
Then again, maybe they just thought New Zealand was part of The Netherlands.