How does it profit anyone to do this?
I know it’s just robospam, no actual Chinese lady named Tracy sat down and composed an email to me alone. But somebody did go to the trouble of – whatever labor goes into producing robospam; if I had any clue I’d try to fake it but I don’t. Ergo, somebody’s making money on this enterprise in some fashion. I just can’t imagine anybody, out of (I’m guessing) multiple millions of annoyed recipients, biting on the ad and providing that money.
It’s early Monsoon, warm and (by my standards) uncomfortably humid, and I have nothing better to do than waste time wondering at the motivation behind unwanted spam in my inbox.
Trolling for live addresses to sell to another spammer? Dunno where the profit is.
Perhaps it’s like COVID; a replicating entity with no useful purpose other than replicating.
It costs them nothing to send out millions of emails, so any live response could lead to profit. If nothing else they found an address that responds to random requests for bids even from China
These emails look so innocent but the reality is very different. The term to describe these emails is “Malvertising.” Click on the script or return address and you will download malware or force unwanted content onto your computer. Exploits in Adobe PDF and Flash are the most common methods used in malvertisements.
What Mike says is fairly common, but if there are zero links or other nastiness, the business model for China is to literally send these out to every address they find, usually to any address that sounds even vaguely like a company, literally a billion messages costs next to nothing to send. If they get one live prospect from a company per million messages, it pays off,
Not much different from Publishers Clearing House.
As Mike says, this type of email is fraught with red flags, Looks like it was sent directly to you: how does a firm in China have your email addy?
Another one going around (I’ve had multiple attempts) is a voice mail supposedly from Amazon, warning you that there’s been a suspicious charge to your account for a purchase (around 1000.00). “To deny this charge, just press 1 to contact us”. Yeah, right. Supposedly this trashes your phone, grabs your contacts, etc.
There probably is money to be made, but I’m convinced some of it is just to cause grief,
Bastards, all.