This thread on spam made me give a little thought to the junk emails I receive. In as much as I ever take any notice of them (Gmail does a remarkably good job of filtering them, and I only occasionally look at the junk folder to check nothing important got chucked in there), the vast majority seem to be aimed at the American “market”. It’s all dollars this and health-insurance that and 401k the other (and adverts for Viagra, and of course none of us Brits need that! )
Very little of it seems to be UK-specific, which got me wondering - do people in, say, Poland get Polish spamski? Do Israelis get spam in Hebrew? Or do they all get the same tide of US-centric crap? I’m guessing people with US-based webmail accounts get all the same American stuff I do, but how about local ISP-based email?
Never gotten any Icelandic SPAM and really don’t think I got any Swedish when I lived there… but I do get a lot of american V14gra and P3nis enlargment spam in the GMail spam folder.
(which you cover in the OP).
But all the SPAM I get to my work account (I get a former collegues e-mail (who apparently used his work-email on loads of sites) in case someone tries to contact him) is US-centric aswel…
I receive quite a bunch of spam from Latin America, but then, I receive it in an address that is easily identifiable as being in a Spanish domain.
However, some of the spam I get there is laughable: Pathetic machine translations into “Spanish” of generic spam that was originally in (I guess) English. Man, it’s HILARIOUS. And you can see that it is the result of machine translation and not some attempt at distorting the language to bypass spam filters.
For the rest, quite a lot of US-centric spam arrives as well, though. It seems to very prevalent.
My work address got put on a list, which got on another list, and I get more than my share of Japanese spam. Interestingly, it’s mostly scams pretending to come from women who want affairs.
Ads on the side of Megaupload or other sites include the Adult meeting sites trying to entice me with “Meet Hot Girls In Balscaddan/Mayo/Ringaskiddy/Ballygobackwards”.
No spam, I think. I’m out of touch because I have Gmail so I don’t “do” spam these days, but some of the ads on websites are funny when they try to be Australian, but clearly aren’t. The typical ones are the “MEET BEAUTIFUL GIRLS IN…” ones because they’ll pick some Sydney suburb that is little-known, or industrial, or is known only for its prison or something like that.
I get a ton of what is either japanese or chinese spam, a fair amount of spanish, and recently a tidal wave of french. All of these aimed at a .com domain registered via a french registrar years ago and used by a UK resident.
Besides the usual US based viagra, rolex and meet hot girls spam, I do get a lot of offers for gift cards I can use in UK based shops and a lot of offers for loans and other money advice.
One of my adresses, which used to get email from a Russian friend, gets lots of Russian spam (I wish google had an option to filter mail by alphabet). Another one, which got used for business reasons to communicate with a French company, gets French spam.
Some of the sites I visit try to get locational ads. These seem to be coming up as a mixture of Spanish and UK ones, lately.
Most of what I get seems to be adressed to Americans, though, or tries to sound as an American company. Or at least, it did the last time I looked through my spam folder before hitting “empty this thing.”
Thankfully, I get very little spam, but what I do receive is mostly in German, fake watches and dating sites mainly. The occasional Nigerian scam is in English, though, or at least some attempt at English.
Yeah, I always giggle when I get a web page with a picture of some near-naked hot chick who allegedly wants a shag tonight, and it says something like “Juanita from Little Trumpington-on-the-Snot”. Their IP address location identifier is choosing villages full of retirees, with 20 houses in them, in which the likelihood of a hot near-naked chick called Juanita, up for a shag tonight, is vanishingly small.
I would say 96% of the spam I receive is targeted at Americans (cheap drugs, tax refunds, etc…) . Even though a large part of the spam I receive isn’t country specific (sex-related spam mostly), it’s still written in English, so it’s obviously not targeting a French audience.
Actually, I cut down a lot on spam by simply filtering messages for common English words (my main provider doesn’t propose a free spam filter).
There is French spam. But it’s minor part of what I receive.
I get my spam mostly via the .de domains I own. Majority English-language but a significant minority of German-language and much less Russian. A bit of Hebrew.
Curiously enough, very very little Japanese-language spam.
The German-language spam is mostly very inept translations (“Der gute Tag, bei mir ist die gute Software”)
What’s also curious: occasionally I get well-designed phishing mails that troll for PIN/TAN of German banks’ online banking. But even people who are not phishing aware must be tipped off by the slightly unidiomatic phrasing. Painstakingly crafted cybercrime thwarted by imperfect language…
)