5 Worst Spam Subject Lines
Written by Sue Walsh on July 28, 2011
Spam volumes may be showing a downward trend but there’s still plenty of it pouring into our inboxes. The subject lines are supposed to get us interested enough to open the message, but more often than not, thanks to the fact many spammers are located overseas and have an extremely poor grasp of the English language, they make us chuckle or shake our heads. Here’s a look at some of the worst:
1. “Report. Your Tax Payment ID: 010332117 has been failed.” Aside from the horrendous grammar, just how does an ID fail, and what did it fail? This is obviously from a phishing attempt but no one who has successfully graduated 3rd grade would fall for it.
2. “??????? ??? ?????, ??????? ????? ????????? ?? ??????” Took a lot of creativity to come up with that one, huh? It’s from a spam message advertising fake college degrees for sale.
3. “Make your ****.003 inches longer!” Hmm. I’m sure you can guess what it’s selling, however if that’s all you get it must be a very poor product. I’m not a male, but I’m guessing that promise isn’t very enticing to anyone who is!
4. “Maintain your weight, amputate!” Well sure, I guess losing an arm or leg would make you weigh less, but it seems a bit drastic. This was from a spam message advertising diet pills.
5. “After Theolia – Bull – Is coming!” I’m not sure what that means or what it was hawking. Since the message it was attached to contained just a URL generated by a url shortening service (which I did not click on), I am guessing it lead to a malicious domain of some sort.
Subject lines like these should tip off just about anyone who gets them that they are spam, but sad to say there are still people that fall for them, either out of ignorance, naïveté or because they let their curiosity get the best of them!
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Thanks for the laugh. We should always consider ourselves fortunate that most spammers’ use of poor language is an instant red flag for us to know to flag an email. Just think what it would be like if spammers actually applied education and thought to their emails before sending them out?
If the subject line is the bait on the hook, it must be said that almost all spammers know nothing about marketing or how to tempt someone into opening an email.
A quick look at my spam folder revealed the following gems:
1. Налоговая оптимизация: создание виртуальной группы компаний (холдинга). – Which according to Google translate means “Tax optimization: the creation of a virtual group of companies (holding company).”
2. We do not require recipes Oxy Codone/Hydrocodone Bitartrate Brevital/barbiturate Valium (Diazepam) Soma (Carisoprodol)
3. Dolphin hunts with electric sense
Really funny – especially the enlargement and amputation parts. Btw, the question marks could be just an encoding issue – i.e. if the title is in a language different from English and our systems can’t display the letters, they could be substituted with symbols, such as the question marks. Nevertheless, it is still funny to see such a subject line in your mailbox.