Lust in Translation?

April 29, 2007

Baseball first. Over at Bugs & Cranks, the latest Atlanta goodies can be found in:

Of Braves and Benjamins — Sometimes, money matters.

Now on with the show.

It seems the porn spammers are getting creative.

I took a quick spin through my ‘Bulk Mail’ folder today, and saw a bunch of sex-peddling messages with subjects apparently designed to fool their way past the spam filters. The latest trick seems to be inserting a random letter into each word, so the subject lines look something like this:

Hgorny schoolxgirls gettisng hjot ankd wibld!!

Szteamy lesbqians in tyhe btathtub!!

Ekstelle Gettwy tankqed ancd toplgess — opnly $9.9d9!!!!

“I spent a good hour convinced some girl named Angelique wanted to show me her ‘pleurisy’.”

Now that’s very clever and all — but it doesn’t seem to be working. None of these cryptic little gems actually made it into my inbox. I had no idea my mail filters looked for words like ‘kinkjy’ and ‘fbunbags’, but I guess they do. Truly, these are heady times in which we live.

Even if some of these messages slipped through, I’m not sure they’d do anyone much good. All those extra letters make things hard to decipher. One of the subjects went on at some length about wild uninhibited ‘coled’ chicks. And I wondered:

‘Cold? Does it really matter if they’re cold? How is that relevant to their wildness or uninhibitionness? Is frostbite hot these days?‘

Eventually, I figured out they meant co-ed chicks, which made a lot more sense. But that didn’t make the other emails any clearer. I spent a good hour convinced some girl named Angelique wanted to show me her ‘pleurisy’.

(That didn’t sound like much fun, but I ponied up the twenty bucks to watch, anyway. Anything for the cuase of medical research.)

Even the legible messages are creepy, though. Read a couple of those subject lines aloud. I tried that, and it freaked me out. I felt like I was about to be bedded by Mushmouth. Not so hot. Terrifying? Yes. But hot? Not so much.

Now I’m waiting to see whether it’s a whole Fat Albert thing the spammers are trying out. I’m half expecting the next batch to feature pictures of women naked except for ‘Dumb Donald’ caps pulled over their faces with eyeholes cut out, or screaming in the message line:

‘HEY HEY HEY, IT’S TRAAAAAAAANS-SEXUALS!!‘

I’m pretty sure I should just stay out of my spam folder for a while. And stop watching old cartoon shows. Somewhere down the line, one or the other’s going to get me into trouble some day.