Just this morning, my daughter and I both got sloppily-misspelled text messages on our phone about our Netflix accounts being suspended because of a problem with billing … spam, of course. The links in such messages are intended to do nasty things to your phone, if clicked upon by the unwary. We’ve been getting quite of few of these messages – alleged to be from Bank of America, PayPal, Amazon, and no, the completely illiteracy of the message makes it screamingly obvious that they are just another spam scam.

Like the email spam messages which eventually completely swamped functional email addresses back in the day, such messages are cheap enough to generate, as long as that one in a million profitable and gullible sucker bites on it. There was a frustrated blogger back then who wished profoundly that they could track down that one in a million person who bit on a spam message and lost their shirt, slap them silly for being such a gullible idiot and making it all profitable for the scammers. It’s the one person in a million who makes it all profitable for a spam scammer … and yes, I’d like to see them slapped silly, for unleashing the spam scammer annoyance on the rest of us.

Just as my daughter and I have gotten ruthless with the romance scammers who infest social media like carpenter ants or termites. Some Instagram accounts that my daughter follows, mostly because the account holders are funny and amusing and have interesting posts – one ‘like’ and seven or eight scammers – usually with names which don’t follow the Western pattern, pictures cribbed from somewhere else and a whole lot of unrelated quotes about romance and God – are zeroing in on her own account. It’s not quite that bad for my own FB page, since I have gotten pretty shrewd about considering ‘friend requests’ – look, guy, if you claim to be a widower of a certain age, highly-educated, perhaps serving in the military, and stationed in some exotic locale, yet there is only a banner heading and a single picture of you on your account, I am deleting your friend request.

I suppose that the most insulting thing is that the Spam Scammers, and the Romance Scammers don’t even try very hard. You know, like being able to spell, figure out conventional Western name conventions, and post a hella lot more pictures on their fake profiles. But then, they might be more effective … So carry on, Spam Scammers – as you were, illiterate in English and all… but if you could let us all know who that one person in a million who falls for your not-terribly-convincing text… Oh no reason at all. Really.