I just got this spam email and I am curious what the language is:
Dir hutt en Don vu 5.800.000,00 €. vum Mavis Wanczyk reagéiert mat dësem Code [MW530342019] fir den Don ze kréien
It is obviously Germanic, but not Hochdeutsch and no Germanic language I am aware of uses é or ë. On the other hand, it is perfectly obvious what it means.
I also don’t see what the scam is. There was no place to click and if I replied what can happen? The return address ends with gov.br, which looks like a Brazilian government site.
Well, this was a little different since 5.8 million euros was on offer and replies would go to a Brazilian govt. address. It is interesting how easy it was to translate despite not knowing even what language it was. But why choose such an obscure language?
It’s a low-capital requirement industry, which encourages experimentation and development.
Also, niche ecosystems which haven’t been previously targeted are ripe for exploitation.
Yes, it’s Luxembourgish. Linguistically it is very close to German dialects spoken across the border from Luxembourg in the Trier region, but it borrowed heavily from French owing to Luxembourg’s close cultural and economic ties to France.
Note that the spelling of Luxembourgish is not very standardised. For a long time it wasn’t written at all, merely spoken, whereas written correspondence in that country was conducted in French or German. In more recent times the government of Luxembourg has made efforts to promote and standardise the language, but many people still spell more or less freely.
It probably took someone all of two seconds to run their existing message through Google Translate. And once that was done, it costs them almost nothing to the message to tens or even hundreds of millions of e-mail addresses. At least some these will reach Luxembourgish speakers (particularly if the scammers prioritize .lu domains), and it will sail past the spam filters since there is almost no Luxembourgish spam to train on. Even if only one person falls for the scam, that’s an enormous return on the investment.
Perhaps scammers are not stupid–certainly some of them are not stupid. Yet, according to @Hari_Seldon, the e-mail he got didn’t even seem to include any clear way to give the scammers his money.
It makes me wonder if there isn’t a sort of weird scam ecosystem out there. Spam about “search engine optimization” seems pretty common. And I swear I have at some point gotten spam e-mails which purported to be ready to sell me…lists of e-mail addresses that I could then send my own spam to! (To be clear: those lists of e-mail addresses were not necessarily any more real than the “H!E!R!B!A!L Viagra” found in other spam e-mails.)
I know this board has also gone through “waves” of spam where we would get lots of posts with links to sites that (apparently) hosted bootleg movies. First of all, I don’t think all of that was posted by bots. I think some spam may still be posted by humans getting paid some absurdly small amount of money per spam post. So, you’ve got those people, getting paid to spam message boards–do they really get paid? And on the flip side, do they really do anything remotely resembling a good job of actually making posts that drive traffic to the whatever web site? Then you have the “spam-masters”: Do they really pay their “workers”? And do they really deliver the desired “clicks” to their customers? And do they really care? I can imagine this is tied in to the “search engine optimization” spam that tries to recruit shady and/or desperate owners of websites: Pay us and we’ll drive traffic to your website (which is itself probably a scam) by recruiting people from Third World or former Communist bloc countries–or maybe just bots–to post garbage posts on message boards to try to lure people into visiting your web site! (Posts that are wished into the cornfield within minutes, and which no one actually clicks on.) “Make money fast” (that we’ll totally pay you, definitely, for sure) posting garbage posts on message boards to try to lure people into visiting some guy’s sleazy and probably virus-laden web site full of pirated World Cup soccer videos!
Make money fast, sending people weirdly inept advance-fee-scam e-mails that have been automatically translated into Luxembourgish! For a low, low advance fee (of X0,000 CFA francs or Transnistrian rubles or whatever) we’ll set you up with everything you need to scam rich gullible Westerners–then you just watch the money roll in! (And when the money doesn’t roll in, too bad, we’ll be long gone with your pitiful life savings.)
It makes me think of the classic cartoon of a big fish eating a medium-sized fish eating a small fish eating a tiny fish (and all the variations on that theme). Not always, but sometimes I think there are scammers out there trying to hustle people who are in turn trying to pull a fast one on someone else, and so on down the line.
That’s hardly unusual—in fact, not including explicit payment instructions in the first contact probably makes it seem a bit less scammy. The scammer in question probably used a valid e-mail address in the “From” field and is hoping for replies from marks.
I visited Luxembourg some years back. Lovely country, charming people. I was astounded by their linguistic skill–it seemed everyone I met could speak French, German, and English in addition to their native tongue, and effortlessly switch between all four.
Yep, usually the ‘reply-to’ address is actually different to the ‘from’ address (the from address may be spoofed so as appear to be something quite official and genuine, but when you click reply, you’re emailing the scammer at a yahoo mailbox or something similar.
They don’t typically ask for payment until after a few rounds of email conversation, and after they have persuaded the victim to divulge personal information such as address, contact numbers, passport or other ID scans, etc, which makes the victim feel more invested in what they then perceive to be official communication.
I think the reason they do this is because if they divulge their payment details (such as a bank account) too early in the conversation, there is a risk that someone savvy enough not to be a victim may report them to their bank and get the account suspended.
Interesting fact about Luxembourg; if you had a grandparent born there, you can get Luxembourg citizenship. The small community south of me was settled by Luxembourgers (who named the town Belgium for reasons I don’t know) and many folks around here have gone and gotten themselves Luxembourg citizenship and passports, thanks to being able to prove their ancestry.
Are you sure the settlers weren’t from Luxembourg the Belgian province and not Luxembourg the independent state? That would make the choice of town name a bit more reasonable (though it would make the notion of getting Luxembourgish citizenship a bit less plausible).
Depends on when those settlers arrived. Luxembourg was in a personal union with the Netherlands until 1890, meaning the King of the Netherlands was simultaneously Grand Duke of Luxembourg, though the two countries were administered separately. Belgium was part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands between 1815 and 1830, so under the rule of the same monarch as what are now Luxembourg and the Netherlands.
From the wiki article: The village continues to have strong cultural ties to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. Members of the Grand Ducal Family of Luxembourg have visited, and the Luxembourg Government sponsors the Luxembourg American Cultural Center and Museum in the community. Among other programs, the center assists Americans of Luxembourgian ancestry in applying for dual citizenship, and since 1987 the village has hosted an annual festival devoted to Luxembourgian food and culture.