Has any­one else seen an influx of Ger­man spam lately?  I have, as has Sam… any­body else?

We’ve been duti­fully feed­ing it into babelfish and var­i­ous other online trans­la­tors, just to give foreign-language spam­mers an oppor­tu­nity to make their impact on their tar­get audi­ence.  Spam email IS effec­tive, ladies and gen­tle­men; whilst I wouldn’t nor­mally give any nor­mal spam a sec­ond glance,

*cat­e­gorised, mark as “read”, filed in the spam folder (4085 messages)*

for­eign lan­guage email (n.b. there are no images in ANY of these emails, only the occa­sional text-only link… if there were images, I wouldn’t have opened them.) gets trans­lated, and then read!  I even clicked on a link or two (after ascer­tain­ing that there were no iden­ti­fy­ing fea­tures to the URL — e.g. email cam­paign suc­cess tracking/address skimming)!!!

The actual con­tent of the emails is… inter­est­ing (or ques­tion­able.)  For the most part, they are polit­i­cal mes­sages of one kind or another — it is not imme­di­ately clear what they are try­ing to say — the gen­eral gist of it seems to be that EU immi­grants are bad, crim­i­nal peo­ple, and shouldn’t be allowed into the coun­try or welfare.

One mes­sage repro­duced here for your convenience:

Immi­gra­tion wave of East­ern Euro­pean peo­ple on social secu­rity fears Munich(rpo). Hans Werner sense, pres­i­dent insti­tute for eco­nomic research has inthe ‘Sued­deutschen Zeitung’ before a solid immi­gra­tion wave of East­ernEu­ro­pean peo­ple on social secu­rity to Ger­many warned. The Euro­pean Unionem­bod­ied tran­si­tion peri­ods for employ­ees, but unem­ployed per­sons migh­t­im­mi­grate imme­di­ately and would have from the out­set ‘Anspruch on all socialLeis­tun­gen’. This reg­u­la­tion is grotesque and the West­ern Euro­pean wel­farestates will destroy. Only a change of the Euro­pean Union con­di­tion can still­pre­vent. The con­se­quences of the lib­er­al­ity guide­line for migra­tions with­inthe Euro­pean Union, approved of by the Euro­pean Union par­lia­ment, are ‘von­pol­i­tics and pub­lic totally ueberse­hen’ , the econ­o­mist crit­i­cized. Eas­tEu­ro­peans may come dur­ing a tran­si­tion period of sev­eral years ‘nicht asem­ploy­ees. As inde­pen­dent ones and not an employed per­son per­sons may dothem itself how­ever imme­di­ately in Ger­many nieder­lassen’, explained sense.‘Von begin­ning on does not have also that employed per­son require­ment on all­so­cial achieve­ments of the state as more native. That becomes many, whichare in the poorer regions of Europe at home, arranges, into the rich wel­farestates of the Euro­pean Union wan­dern.’ The incen­tives are over pow­er­ful. TheGerman social wel­fare assis­tance is five times as highly as slowakischer­wages. The forth­com­ing poverty migra­tion made of East­ern Europe will erode­the West­ern Euro­pean wel­fare states: ‘Die states will back-screw theirachieve­ments in a kind deter­rence com­pe­ti­tion, because none become the goalof the wel­fare migra­tions will’, and ‘im final result could be Europe onlyas socially, as it Amer­ica today ist’. In order to turn away this, theEu­ro­pean Union states ‘das right of the migra­tion would have into the­Sozial­staat’ paint: The home­land would have to remain respon­si­ble for the­so­cial secu­rity ben­e­fits at not employed per­son immi­grant, demanded the ifopresident.

Babelfish’d, not human trans­la­tion, hence the… obscure… nature of it all.

All this poses an inter­est­ing ques­tion in terms of email-marketing/spam: would you get a higher mar­ket pen­e­tra­tion by send­ing foreign-language mes­sages, and a babel link?

Pos­si­bly not… not every­one is as weird as myself, and most prob­a­bly still wouldn’t bother.  I imag­ine they get a high enough click­through by sim­ply send­ing out pr0n email… sad, but prob­a­bly true.

So has any­one else been receiv­ing this kind of email?  Does any­one speak/translate Ger­man flu­ently and receive this kind of email (i.e. can you make more sense of it than babelfish’d eng­lish does?)