wow, good thing Hotmail caught this or I would NEVER have recognized it as spam

[electricland]

Dear customer,

During a recent update and verification of Washington Mutual Internet Banking Accounts, our system was unable to fully validate your account information. There are two possibile explanations:

• Your current account information has not been verified in the previous six months; or


• An error occured during the security update, and vital information was lost or destroyed.

As a result, our system has been set to remove your information completely from the updated security network at the completion of the month of January.

If you wish to exclude your account from the removal list, please follow the link below. The fields presented in the new window represent the information that has expired, or been damaged. Please update these fields to continue using your Wamu account normally.

To get started Click Here.

Please update your records on or before January 31, 2005.

Thank you!

The Safety Department.

Dear Insulters of My Intelligence:

Really, you're going to have to do better than that. I mean, setting aside that I don't HAVE an account at Washington Mutual, you sent this out two days after my (nonexistent) account was gone forever.

However, the Safety Department was a nice ironic touch.

Thank you!

Me.

Comments

[wanderingaengus.livejournal.com]

I do have an account at Washington Mutual, and I must admit that I started to move my mouse to the "Click Here" button before I started thinking. If you ask a million people for ten bucks, you're going to find a hundred who do. Fucking spammers.

[electricland.livejournal.com]

gotta admit, the one from PayPal nearly had me. But I've seen about six of them now, and the magic is fading.

Do you think they put the typos in to be sporting?

[brisingamen.livejournal.com]

According to the spam I receive I've got accounts all over the place. There is a reason why I won't give an email address to banks and other financial institutions ... it saves me wondering about emails like this.

[electricland.livejournal.com]

good idea!

I was a bit put out to get a legitimate email from one of my banks that DID look highly suspicious -- the reply-to address was from a completely different domain name. So I forwarded it to them with a gentle suggestion that maybe they would reconsider sending this kind of thing out in the future. I don't think they quite got the picture though.

[jenlev.livejournal.com]

frelling spammers indeed. argh. i sent something like that to the "abuse" email address at my server a while back. the resulting flurry of response was gratifying to see.

you're right about the "safety department" very funny in a surreal ironic way. i hate spam. :)

[electricland.livejournal.com]

it is very evil. I have to say, Hotmail is doing a pretty decent job of catching mine (most of which is in a non-Western character set at the moment, for extra fun).

[jenlev.livejournal.com]

and more of it arrived today. *headdesk* there's been an upswing this week... *sigh*

but LJ takes a lot of the sting out of that; it's great fun to check my personal email on breaks and at lunch, because i can giggle at the posts/comments even if i can't post to LJ from work. ;)