Less than 1/2 hour ago, I received a mess in my inbox. Someone sent an email out to an unknown quantity of email recipients with no subject and the message body stating “Who are you”. To me, this screams phishing. Well, to (currently) 11 people, it didn’t. There were silly responses (“I contain mutitudes”) to “Take me off this email”. One person did reply stating “you are all replying to a fraud email…stop replying…” Which is the most useful message on there. But, really, not that helpful. So, just mark them as spam and move along. Replying lets the scammers know that a) this email is valid and b) you are somewhat gullible and, therefore, more susceptible to phishing scams. And, of course, replying all to these sorts of things floods other people’s inboxes.
So, please, just don’t. I guess if you feel called to troll scammers, just reply to the original sender. I’ve got other things to do than manage this junk in my inbox.
My goodness! People are STILL replying to the spammer with “take me off this list”. Sigh…
I’m reluctant to hit ‘Reply’ today, Carl. Sorry, couldn’t resist.
But you reminded me of a friend who got sick of regular spammers on the phone and deliberately lured one in for a long chat before revealing himself. The next day the scammer rang and asked for ‘Mr Chris’. Getting confirmation, Chris heard a brief ‘You #_@£’ before the caller rang off. But it seems he WAS taken off the list.
Today I had 7 messages on this thread. It pains me to see so many people fail on this point.
[…] it’s been an interesting few days in the land of spam and phishing. Yesterday I wrote about a spam email I received, along with dozens of others that’s gotten a bit silly. Today I noticed an invite in one of […]