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The Nigerian Spam Scam Contest! Last Updated: 06/20/05 10:31 PM Have you gotten the spam that says if you will simply send some complete stranger in Nigeria your bank account numbers, they will "temporarily" put like $30 million into your account, of which you can keep 20%? It says to treat the correspondence as "secret and confidential"? If not, consider yourself lucky. I receive this thing multiple times each week. (See my page "The Worst Spam Ever" for more details about this phenomenon!) It used to piss me off, but then I decided I could have fun with it. So, I decided to start up a "Nigerian Spam Scam Contest!" Hey, if you can't fight it, you might as well have some fun with it, right? The way the contest worked was people would send me the Nigerian spams they received, and I would tabulate it up. We would take the amount promised and multiply it by the percentage promised and add up the amounts promised over a 6 month period. And the one major rule was no duplicate spams; they had to be from unique e-mail addresses, so that if you received the same spam 8 times, you could only count it once. Therefore, when you see someone received 322 spams, that was 322 UNIQUE Nigerian spams. My goal was to show that these things were not uncommon; it's a lot more common occurrence than people might be led to believe. And no one should ever fall for a Nigerian spam, especially when there are people receiving hundreds of these things each day. The complete results of the previous 2002 contests can be found on a separate page, and the complete results of the first contest of 2003 can be found on their page. And the monthly results from the 2004 contests can be found on their page. Here are the final standings in the April 2004 Contest:
Here are the
final
standings in the May 2004 Contest:
And thanks to everyone who participated over the past three years! Latest News: Some of you have asked about Spam Scam Contest Gear, so I am proud to offer you the official Spam Scam Contest T-Shirt from the RIYP Store. Let everyone know what you do with your spam! 5/23/04 - Well, after two and a half years, I am calling it quits on the contest. I don't have the time to devote to it any more, and I think I have made my point with the Nigerian spam. I know I have saved a few people from getting taken in by these scum, and I hope it continues to help those who receive these for the first time to hesitate and realize it's all a scam. Thanks for all your support over the past two and a half years, and while the contest won't be going on any more, the rest of the website will continue to go on. Also, I have some plans in the works for other ways to have fun with the spam. It's going to take me a few months to get organized and get them set up, but check in from time to time to see what's new. I plan on working next weekend on updating the April and May results, so check back then and hopefully they'll be done. If you have an interesting spam you think I might be interested in, feel free to post it in the Spam Forum or to send it to me for inclusion in the Spamfight section (although you will need to use "Spamfight" as the subject to get past my spam filter). Thanks again everyone for visiting and participating. I hope you all had fun with it! Want to rant about spam? Feel free to rant away in the Spam Forum! |
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