Phishermen are Stoopid

I was cleaning out my spam folder in my Gmail yesterday (I do it about once a week). One of the mails I saw as I was scanning through, was a mail from "IRS" with a subject of "Your Tax Return."

I'm not an American, so I didn't click on it. But I could see an American of slightly lower intelligence clicking on the mail to find out what it's all about.

Then I saw another mail (probably sent an hour or two earlier), from "Internal Revenue Service" with a subject of "Your Tax Return."

Hmm.... I've seen this before in my spam folder with mails trying to get me to confirm my banking details and such (by the way, in case you didn't know, you should never ever click on any links in any such e-mail!). I've often thought that phishing mails might have more success if they didn't send the exact same e-mail three different times on the same day, from three different "From" display names.

My, but people can BITCH!

I got a newsletter from Hellopeter.com yesterday. It was the first newsletter I'd received from them in a long time. Anyway, they said that they now had a Twitter account (@Hellopetercom). I thought "what the hell?" and decided to follow them...

Wow. Just... wow! They tweet every single report made on their site, as its made. Not only is this uber information-overload, it is really eye-opening. Since yesterday I've lost count of the number of reports that have come through my TweetDeck--and I think I've seen two compliments! People drone on about the most mundane, pointless things. I've used Hellopeter myself a few times to complain, I must admit, but only as a last resort. And I've logged a few compliments in my time as well. I understand it's human nature to complain, but why do people find it so difficult to say something nice every once in awhile? Obviously, any company's stats on Hellopeter will be heavily skewed, because of this phenomenon.

Honestly, I think they need to enforce some kind of ratio, where you have to write at least one compliment for five complaints or something. But then, the site will never get used.

Then of course, there's the exhorbitant fee that Hellopeter charges companies to allow them to respond to those complaints. Don't even get me started on that!