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February 09, 2005

According to today's spam, I've won yet another international lottery. C'mon, guys, my mattress is already overstuffed from the millions of euros won in earlier lotteries. Give someone else a chance!

I've written about this stuff before here and here, so there's no need to go into details. But this time the sender took some of the oomph out of his scam by including—in plain view in the To: field—the list of 100 addressees of this mailing. Does that mean that each of us had the same "winning number," or do we split the half-million euros among us? The barely English message gives little clue.

The creepy part, though, is that I recognize several addresses in the list. Lots of good computer industry folks in this list: Dan Farber, David Coursey, Dave Winer, Dan Shafer, Michael Miller, Doug Baron, and Steve Riggins, to name several. And then there are some really old addresses for Chris Gulker and Bud Colligan that must have been invalid for at least five years. I can only assume that these addresses were harvested by a worm in an infected PC somewhere, and probably the machine of someone who knows these folks and me. It was spooky enough for me to check my own address book to see if the addresses are in there. Most are not (plus I run an antivirus-protected Mac, making the likelihood of infection extremely remote).

While the list of addressees might be valuable to someone trying to get the word out about something in the computer industry, I get the feeling they're mostly experienced computer users who wouldn't give this lottery scam a half-second of thought. What a complete waste of bits.