You Never Get Something For Nothing

Right, the next time someone emails you about some wonderful free offer just bloody ignore it.

My wife forwarded me an email (sad that this is how we communicate now) entitled “Free M & S Vouchers!!!”. It’s clearly an attempt to spam the Andy Curran at Persimmonhomes.com email address. Apparently, there’s this special collaboration between Marks and Spencers and Persimmon Homes; the instructions carefully state that all you need to do is cc him in on the email to ten of your mates, and your vouchers will magically appear in the next few days. Ohmygodohmygod: spam everyone.

So stop. Cleverly, a few people have already blogged about this. Perhaps not so cleverly, they’ve printed Andy Curran’s address in full, so now numerous Internet bots will be furiously spamming the account, along with a large network of gullible Internet users (and, yes, I’d have to include my wife in this group) who want their free vouchers.

I suspect Andy Curran has long since had to change his email address (it sounds like this particular scam has been around for a while), or else Persimmon Homes have invested in some decent spam filtering. In fact, I suspect the “this is a scam” email she got from Message Labs originated from the Persimmon email address; it certainly wouldn’t have come from the assorted gmail, hotmail, and yahoo addresses she forwarded the mail on to.

So today’s lessons:

1) if it sounds too good to be true, it almost certainly is.

2) if you’re asked to spam lots of people with an email, please don’t; I get enough spam as it is.

3) if you can’t be trusted to use email in a tolerable manner please fill your bath with water, drop any Internet connected computer you may own into previously mentioned bath, and leave for approximately the rest of your life. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to retrieve the computer from the bath.