Verruckte Germanische Spammers
12 Jun 2004Has 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?)