Deranged phishing spam

Just received this piece of garbage from someone ostensibly in Iran - why do they even bother?

From:* Rt Hon David Cameron MP <morshedi@nigeb.ac.ir>
*To:* undisclosed-recipients:;
*Date:* Tue, 27 Sep 2011 15:27:05 +0330 (IRST)

PRIME MINISTER'S OFFICE
TREASURY AND MINISTER FOR THE CIVIL SERVICE,
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM.

Our ref: MasterCard/5404/FCO
Your ref:...Date: 27/09/2011

IMMEDIATE PAYMENT NOTIFICATION

I am The Rt Hon David Cameron MP,Prime Minister, First Lord of the Treasury and Minister for the Civil Service British Government. This letter is to officially inform you that (MasterCard Number 5404 xxxx xxxx xxxx) has been accredited with your favor. Your Personal Identification Number is 7121.The MasterCard Value is £2,000,000.00 GBP (Two Million, Great British Pounds Sterling).

This office will send to you an MasterCard that you will use to withdraw your funds in any ATM MACHINE CENTER or MasterCard outlet in the world with a maximum of £5000 GBP daily.Further more,You will be required to re-confirm the following information to enable;The Rt Hon William Hague MP First Secretary of State for British Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO). begin in processing of your MasterCard.

(1)Full names: (2)Address: (3)Country: (4)Nationality: (5)Phone #: (6)Age:(7)Occupation: (8) Post Codes

Rt Hon William Hague MP.Secretary of British Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO)
Email; bfcaffair@msn.com
Tel: Tel: +(obscured to prevent anyone calling it)

TAKE NOTICE: That you are warned to stop further communications with any other person(s) or office(s) different from the staff of the State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs to avoid hitches in receiving your payment.

Regards,

Rt Hon David Cameron MP
British Prime Minister

No to 'Outbound telesales'

At home, we seem to suffering a new spate of unsolicited sales calls - spam telephony, if you like (or don't). Even though both of the numbers are registered with the Telephone Preference Service (http://www.tpsonline.org.uk), the companies that are doing this just don't care. They're calling on what are clearly long distance circuits, with pre-dialling (sometimes several seconds delay after you answer before a human voice comes on the phone), and connect you to someone with a distinctly non-British accent, who doesn't know who they're really trying to contact.

This can be dangerous. Even when the caller identifies the name of the company she or he represents, there's no way to know whether or not this is for real. Someone called me today, she said, on behalf of a company whose services I've used for years. But she got the number of years wrong, and that says to me that she was doing the telephone equivalent of phishing.

I don't want to give any details to an unknown caller to enable them to offer me 'advice'. Nor do I do want to invite a high-pressure salesman into my home just because they happen to have 'someone in the area' next week; what area, planet Earth?

Telephone companies are bothersome at best when they phone to try and sell something. When they ask you at the end of a 20 minute call, "by the way, the contract is for 18 months, is that all right?", that doesn't feel like trustworthy practice. When you say, "I'd like to see the offer in writing", and they say it's only available today over the phone, is that a strong reason buy anyway? And if they send the key details, and they're in grey 4-point on the back of the brochure, is someone trying to hide something?

Frankly, I can find the products I want using Google, a newspaper, or even a flyer through the post. And then visit the website or make the call to Inbound Telesales, knowing who I'm calling, to do the deal. That's exactly what I did regarding buildings and contents insurance recently. Outbound Telesales is only for things you don't really want. Be brave - don't tick the box allowing them to contact you.

Random sender addresses

I'm getting really fed up with the practice that some companies have adopted, of setting a new sender address for every e-mail newsletter.

For example, IThound, an Incisive Media publication, sent something with the sender address

mail.ctjkgqetqgbvegquskn@incisive-media.msgfocus.com

This is presumably so that they can route any replies to the originator of the offer that the newsletter covers.

That's not a trusted address so the message is marked as [Spam] and placed in the Junk Mail folder. If I click 'Mark As Wanted' in the AVG toolbar, the message is moved back to the Inbox but no Outlook rules are applied to it. I have to file it manually. A new entry is added to the AVG whitelist, and any further messages from the same sender should be filed according to my Outlook rules settings. In all likelihood, there won't be any further messages with the same random sender address, so all that happens is that my whitelist is stuffed with rubbish like this.

Streetcards, one of my occasional suppliers, who have great products, change the domain name on their outgoing e-mails and the same thing happens.

I actually want to read some of the material that I'm sent. That's why I signed up in the first place. I don't want to unsubscribe, but I don't want to have to waste time either. Hang your heads in shame:

• Incisive Media
• Novatech
• Internet World
• Insurance Times
• Euromoney plc
• Streetcards