Ready, Aye, Ready

In my mailbox today was a letter postmarked from Spain, Madrid to be precise. I don't actually know anyone in Spain so gave it a look. Inside was -- oh, I can hardly contain myself -- a notice that I had a winning ticket in the "El-Gordo Sweepstake Lottery" and won $815,950.71. This was my "notfication" of winning from the "International Lotto Corporation" courtesy of "Eurolinks Securities Madrid." And better still, I could still win the $1.3 billion international lottery. Man, I could make more money than most countries here!

However:

Due to mixed up of some numbers and names, we ask that you keep this award from public notice

Oh, my, what a good idea. Wouldn't want anyone else getting in on this.

Of course the fact that the wonderfully named "notfication" completely excluded any personal information and is a somewhat askew colour photocopy shouldn't raise any issues; the lack of a real contact address is surely just a minor omission and of no consequence.

My cynicism could be due to me winning this a few months ago too. Same cover letter with a few details changed and that's about it. They didn't even stretch to buying a nice little watermarker or perhaps one of those cool stamps of incorporation that engineers get. Nope, just one poorly duplicated sheet of paper. I mean, if they're going to defraud me, at least try to make it a bit convincing.

You might have thought that if I didn't bite the first time around I might just not possibly the second. Yup, they think we're stupid. That's all there is to it.

Addendum: "Eurolinks Securities" makes a quite amusing appearance over at a href="http://escam.blogspot.com/" Scamblog.

Update: Removed the Scamblog link as it's apparently become some sort of adblog site and lost all of the original content.