I was talking (and by talking I mean commenting back and forth) with my buddy OMGWTF on her blog recently and the topic of fraud came up.  I mentioned that we get a ton of emails from fraudsters trying to sniff out our willingness to fall prey to their scams and she suggested that I share some of them on the blog. Since I'm always happy to riff off of someone else's idea (especially when the idea comes from one of the industry's best bloggers), I started rummaging through PoolDawg's virtual garbage for a good fraudster email.  What I found was absolute gold! Rather than share all of them at once, I figured I'd devote blog posts to the most entertaining of the bunch.  The one we received today is an example of an email format that we've been getting consistently over the past month or so (not sure why, but I felt the need to redact the person's email address and name even though they're likely both fake).

At the outset, it seems like a fairly reasonable (although poorly written) email.  Once you start peeling away the layers though,  you'll get to the bottom of why this email landed right in our spam folder. The first issue is the fact that this person sent the email to himself rather than to us. This typically means they've set up a list file to spam out to, as the "to" field would have a PoolDawg address otherwise.  Moving on to the body of the email, the author begins with "Dear Customer" even though he is the customer and we are the supplier.  Finally there is the content itself, which reads exactly like 30 other emails we've received in the past few weeks, with the only difference being the name and what the emailer includes in the parentheses.  Plus, he asks us a number of questions for which he should know the answer (if we take credit cards, which we obviously do for example). So, are these interesting or entertaining to people outside of the PoolDawg offices?  You'll have to tell me because I personally get quite a kick out of them.