As such things are reckoned I was an early adaptor of The Internet. So I've got decades of experience with Spam email. In general it is a low level annoyance, the equivalent of a single mosquito humming around your ear. You swat it and get on with things.
But occasionally I run across a new species, something that holds my interest long enough to study it. And I'll be honest here, I'm feeling bad for Kate Potter. Maybe you've seen things like this:
Ms. Potter's efforts to book talent and household functionaries are confined to a few small areas in Florida. They can be generic, such as housekeepers, and weirdly specific.....Magicians. And they are all on the behalf of people with identical first and last names.
If you hold the emails up at a safe distance, obviously without opening any links, they purport to be related to something called Bark(dot)com out of London, England.
Kate Potter appears to be an actual social media/communications consultant out of Australia. She is not happy to have her name and reputation sullied in this fashion.
On the other hand, Griggs G. Griggs (I'm just assuming the middle name) is probably very happy. Various real estate sites claim the median price for homes sold in the zip code indicated are $12.75 million. Or 8.5 mill, or 1.195 mill. Hmmmm, I'm almost starting to become suspicious of economic activity in the Miami, FL area.....
Out of curiosity I decided to keep track for the month of May.
My tally for the month: 18 emails, 15 housekeeper, 3 magician.
And who is so fruitlessly seeking this help? Griggs Griggs, G G ,Yvette Yvette, Rita Rita, Vs Vs Emilio Emilio, Janet Janet, Guerline Guerline, Elizabeth Elizabeth and so on. Each and every one with the odd doubled name. What are the odds?
And more seriously, what is the point?
Clearly these emails are being machine generated. It would be the only way to keep churning out this stuff and presumably sending it to millions of potential suckers on a daily basis. I hope the AI spambots still receive a modicum of input from weaselly humans. Said weasels have an idea, a concept. Lets take a job description that is so specific that 99.9% of people will never need it....a Magician. I've never even considered hiring one. Oh, add on Housekeepers too. Locate these hypothetical jobs in a swanky community, and make the potential employers sound totally not fake by botching the names on each of the emails sent out by the millions, once again, making them so implausible that 99.99% of people in Miami will not have names anything like that. Sure....that's the ticket....
To add a final note of weirdness to this saga.....after getting these spam emails every day for a couple of weeks, and sometimes more than once a day, they just stopped. Did Jose Jose finally step up and hire that Housekeeper? Or have the AI Spambots just moved on to some other misconception of what will separate the rubes from the rubles?
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