Last week I went through my spam folder in my e-mail client. One, I wanted to make sure that no good e-mails had slipped through the cracks. Fortunately, not. And two, I wanted to go through the word salad spams and see if I could find some completely batshit phrase that might make for a fun writing prompt — something like “The polar bear rode the pencil to the top floor.” I don’t know what that is, but it’s genius.
I noticed something… odd, however.
Picture spam has become quite common in the past year. Rather than send yet another text message about some stock that’s about to become really, really big, the spammers had taken to send an image with the text, on the belief that a spam filter won’t see the words that indicate that this might, in fact, not be a legitimate message.
I noticed that the picture spam had become… strange.
The pictures weren’t legible. They were pixilated. Strange colors. The idea that, maybe, these were meant to be read with 3-D glasses even occurred to me. First thought — That’s weird. Second thought — Why? Third thought — Well, that‘s going in the garbage.
I filed the little factoid away. Spam for people wearing 3-D glasses. Gotcha.
It turns out this is the latest spam tactic — the thinking seems to be that spam filters won’t recognize the 3-D-ified image.
The obvious problem is, this isn’t going to make a sale. It’s confusing to the customer. Not that I’m in the market for what a spammer is flogging, because I’m not.
It’s just weird.
So, fair readers, if you get a 3-D spam image, it’s not your eyes deceiving you. It really is supposed to be like that. 😕