Taunting Email

At Message Partners, one of the top ISP email security solutions, we use everything in our arsenal to beat back spam and keep it out of your inbox. We use pre and post-queue filtering, we use pattern matching, we even use taunting. Yes, that's right, we taunt spam; just in case spam one day gets its feelings hurt and decides to leave us all alone.

I received the following message:

GOOGLE EMAIL LOTTERY INTERNATIONAL
WORLD INTERNET LOTTO CENTRE
EASTERN AVE 6528
INTERNATIONAL PROMOTION / PRIZE AWARD DEPT.
PROMOTING INTERNET USAGE OVER THE GLOBE
( WE ENCOURAGE GLOBALIZATION)

Dear Winner,

Congratulations to you as we bring to your notice the result of GOOGLE LOTTERY 2007 promotion. We are happy to inform you that your email address have emerged a winner of One Million (1,000,000.00) Euros. Your fund is now deposited with the paying Bank. In your best interest to avoid mix up of numbers and names of any kind, we request that you keep the entire details of your award strictly from public notice until the process of transferring your claims has been completed, and your funds remitted to your account. This is part of our security protocol to avoid double claiming or unscrupulous acts by participants / non participants of this program.

NOTE: to file for your claim, please contact the claim department below on email.
***********************************************
Mr. George Paniou.
Trust Claims Agency
Address:Thinos 73, 10722 Athens Greece.
Tel.:+30-694-092-9118
Email :trustclaim@aim.com
**********************************************

Begin taunt:

Wow, George, so I've won another lottery. You must know, as you claim to be Google, that I get a lot of lottery notices that turn out to be not so true. I mean, if I had a nickel for every email that told me I was a lottery winner, I'd have more money than a lottery winner.

But I digress, as I'm a lottery winner, and I should be clearly leaping about in ecstasy at winning 1 million Euros. Wait, why Euros? I thought Google was a good-old American company. I mean, Europe is nice, and it gave us civilization, but wouldn't Google want to maximize the local goodwill by having a local million dollar lottery? I mean, the kind of money they have, they could probably afford a Billion dollar lottery.

And then you tell me that although I've won, I'd better keep it quiet. Wow, so that's one of the super-secret lotteries. And here I thought a company lottery would be to get attention, to get press, but no, this one's a secret. That's one funny lottery, George.

Then there's the clincher, George. You tell me it's the Google lottery, but then your reply email address has nothing to do with Google. Come on, George, if you're going to be a decent cyber-criminal, at least learn to load the gun and fill-up the getaway car.

It's not like I was born yesterday. As a matter of fact, I just got an email that tells me if I buy these pills I can be born yesterday. I have to go, George.