As I’m browsing through alt.books.tom-clancy I find a thread that makes absolutely no sense to me and doesn’t appear to be garden variety spam. The sender claims to be a “Detective VAN” (sic) and he is hot on the trail of Jeff Bond. Here’s the message:
So this raises several questions:
Who is Jeff Bond and why is this turkey looking for him?
Can this possibly be a real cop looking for a real criminal? (What kind of real cop would post this in dozens of newsgroups if he was trying to keep the investigation hush-hush?)
Assuming question 2 turns out to be a negative, why would anyone post something like this?
Also, the message was posted once and replied to three times. One of the replies was replied to again. All from the same guy (the original poster), all with the same original message. WTF? Did the guy just not know when to let go of the “send message” button or what?
This kind of bizarro spam is the kind of thing that keeps me awake at night. I need the Straight Dope!
It’s simple harrassment, most likely. Probably kids with a hate on for someone.
If you follow the archived references back, the first posting is from February, and is a bit less imaginative:
From February on, there’s a bulk of trollish postings. Some claiming to be from “Jeff,” in misc.kids, claiming to have murdered his “fat wife and children”, in misc.pizza-delivery-drivers, claiming the man is a “pizza delivery driver stalker”. These ones have several links (disguised with tinyurl) claiming to be pics and video.
Someone also seems to have written a script that replies to messages mentioning that email address with spoofed headers and a message body that says “FUNNY FUNNY FUNNY.”
Just run-of-the-mill usenet gluebags. Don’t lose any sleep over it-- just killfile 'em.