The day I got Second Life spam

It had to happen, of course. It was cleverly camouflaged as an offer to publish an article on Second Life, but it was not addressed to any journal, it was addressed to a sender. But because of past involvement with journals, I opened it.

What was in there was plainly an attempt to sell the business idea of Second Life:

Edm AB--- Greetings fellow Earth dwellers... My name is Anand Goberdhan and I’m here to share with you the possibilities that are available

Within the metaverse called secondlife. Http//www.secondlife.com is where you can find the system requirements and software to interact with the world... system specs aren’t really that out of the ordinary! I am running a pc that is two yrs old...half of its ram has went dead...and the video card i use was merely 80 dollars Canadian (a year ago to boot). It seems that a lot of people joined the revolution...shortly after a name I’m surprised i remember..a lady by the name of Anshe Chung officially became a millionaire off of a ten dollar investment in the metaverse.

I actually spoke with a woman who says she knew her... and she was a VERY GOOD BUSINESS WOMAN. I guess you could call her the Michael Jordan of the metaverse. As it stands she is officially the first online game PLAYER to ever earn a million online. I know, you’re wondering ‘why is he telling me this?,’ and the answer is very simple...

The first game player to make a million dollars MADE IT OFF SECONDLIFE. She accomplished this 2 yrs ago...they must have signed up 15 million new people since then. But (and i kid you not) this world is an entrepreneurs PARADISE. You can...run 50 shops... and have the money split up equally between multiple partners...

I am sure that Linden Labs will claim to have nothing to do with this spam, and say it's some over-eager entrepeneur who wants to draw more people into their game and business. To me, it looks like a classic pyramide scam. Linden Labs may not have anything to do with it, but operators within SL are certainly not strangers to the fact that money can be made of selling the hope of more money.

It is a quite interesting little example of how the patterns of the flesh world repeats themselves in the digital world, and when we start talking about virtual worlds, scammers definitely belong. This is their arena after all, the dreams, the unreal, the potential and the possibly possible - that is what they sell to us, their tricks, and where better to do so than in an arena of possibilities?

More clever spam

Can you guess I am desperate not to write what I should? Anyway, writing at the blog again, I just checked a comment I permitted. Turned out that it was the most clever of spam.

What it did was to copy a passage from another post:

I believe that there should be gold-sinks in the game; however, make the currency sink a thing of pure fluff. In the MMORPG Ultima Online, it cost 500k (a decent sum of money) just to dye your hair a fancy neon color. The hair color did not give you a statistical advantage over your opponent, it did, however, show your high status.

This was part of the content of a comment on a farily old post of mine. It looked perfectly to the point of the post, so I didn't hesitate on permitting it. But being a curious old bitch I wanted to see what exactly that comment was about, so I checked. That's when I recognized the words.

I can't help it, the cleverness and inventiveness of spammers is impressive. All this effort and energy, just to invade the blogs of strangers! I almost feel flattered.