Why You Should Never “Send this E-mail to 8 People” March 2, 2007
Posted by ibenaija in Blogroll, General, Scams, Schemes, Web.trackback
We’ve all received that e-mail, right? The one that urges us to “forward this to 20 people” in return for anything from “a laptop from Dell” to “a miracle in 7 days” to an outright “surprise right after you click ‘Send’”. Who hasn’t seen the one that says Bill Gates will send you a check for $1 for every single person you forward the message to?
I just received one such e-mail today, and couldn’t help but shake my head at the gullibility and outright folly of the universe. The e-mail appeared to have traversed a good portion of the Internet, for it appeared to have been forwarded many a time. Scrolling through the multitude of e-mail headers (To, From, CC, etc.), revealing the e-mail’s traversal path, to the bottom of the message, brought me upon:
Hi everyone,
The Ericsson Company is distributing free computer Lap-tops in an attempt to match Nokia that has already done so. Ericsson hopes to increase its popularity this way. For this reason, they are giving away the new WAP laptops. All you need to do to qualify is to send this mail to 8 people you know. Within 2 weeks, you will receive EricssonT18. But if you can send it to 20 people or more, you will receive Ericsson R320.
Make sure to send a copy to : anna.swelung@ericsson.com
The scheme here should be fairly obvious: you send this to 8 people, cc’ing Ms. “Anna Swelung” at “Ericsson.com”. Depending on how gullible your 8 friends are (let’s say that an arbitrary 50% of them are in fact gullible and forward the message to 8 of their own friends), Ms. Swelung now has your e-mail address, plus the 8 e-mail addresses you forwarded to her (via cc), plus the 8 e-mail addresses that 4 of your recipients sent to her… (and this doesn’t even count the e-mail addresses of the folks upstream to you; i.e., the folks that sent you the message in the first place).
Now, let’s say you and your friends are really, really gullible, and decide to up the ante by forwarding the e-mail to not 8, but 20 of your buddies… Think about how quickly (read: exponential growth) Ms. Swelung’s e-mail box will fill-up with the e-mail addresses of folks thirsty for a free laptop computer… Ah, thousands, if not millions of e-mail addresses, harvested, and ready to be spammed with Viagra, Cialis, and HornyAsianVixens.com come-ons.
Out of curiously, I copied ericsson.com from the contact’s e-mail address, and pasted it into my browser’s address window (which resolved it to www.ericsson.com). The site I came to appeared to have no more than a slightly subliminal connection to the telephone company at www.sonyericsson.com.
A couple thoughts:
- If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.
- By extention, if it doesn’t make sense, it probably, well, doesn’t. (A company gives away its high-cost/high-margin product, on a large (Internet-wide) scale—to “increase its popularity” and match its competition? How sustainable is that?!)
- And, finally, there is no such thing as a free lunch; in fact, there is no such thing as ‘Free’. Everything has a price.
I really do hope that those little programs that scour the Internet in search of e-mail addresses, ALL grab Anna Swelung’s e-mail address from this page, and that they all collectively spam her to no end. That would give her a taste of her own medicine.
Postscript:
The clincher: neither Ericsson T18 nor Ericsson R320 (pictured) are laptop computers; both are cellular phones.
And, both are discontinued models.
What I don’t understand though, is a spammer like Anna Seung? Working at Ericsson?
How come?
The email addr that’s the harvester has seems to be a legit one.
How can she be a harvester?
I’m not disagreeing with you, but this is the same question that rocked me.
Actually, I googled about her again.
And this is what I found:
http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/internet/a/ericsson_hoax.htm
I dont understand why many of us are so gullible anyway, if it is too good to be true, many times, it isnt. And its so simple, if you have acess to internet to forward such mails, try and spend about 3mins to verify the correctness of what you are sending
Shoeb-
We’ve heard of things like phishing, and URL redirects, and such… The point is that with sufficient will and skill, one can achieve practically any feat.
The fact that the product being touted as a ‘free’ laptop is in fact a discontinued cellular phone should lead us to conclude that, at the minimum, Anna Swelung is up to no good.
To your point though, my main argument about this being an e-mail address harvesting scheme is pure conjecture.
I used to wonder where those viagra adverts in my inbox originated from! Obviously my friends who are looking for free gifts have inadvertently sent my email address to scammers! Do’h!
I just dont know why pple cant double check such stuff before sending them out. I mean, as any naija man shd know nothing is for free!
Well, when I helped to build the site in late 2000 / early 2001, http://www.ericsson.com was certainly owned by Ericsson the Swedish Telecoms company. I’ve still got the description of the site’s architecture archived onto CDs somewhere.
Their consumer division joined forces with Sony a year or so later. They go a long way back in Swedish corporate history, and specialised in large telecomms switch-gear and stuff like that.
It was a nice gig, but cold.
Aphra
PS - I you may be right about email address harvesting, but don’t blame Ericsson.
Good theory but this hoax is pretty old. Turns out there is no such Anna Swelund and the email address given has never worked- Got the following off of Snopes which references to what happened during one carnation of this hoax in April 2000:
“But of course, Ericcson made no such offer, the e-mail address provided was bogus, and the company employed no one by the name of “Anna Swelund.” Ericcson was hit so hard by inquiries about this hoax that they set up an auto-response for mail to the Anna.Swelund@ericcson.com e-mail address (the auto-reply message stated that there was no such account, there was no “free phone” offer, and there was no Anna Swelund working for the company) and inserted a denial of the rumor into their web site FAQ.”
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/nothing/ericsson.asp
Aren’t we all the eternal optimists?
I’ve never believed these mails, usually I delete them immediately but now and again I pass them on to share the fun.
of the rebuttals - you’d think I have better things to do with my precious time.
I never thought about the email address harvesting so I do apologise to all my friends if they suddenly start getting mail offering them bigger and better boobs and/or other body parts. Your revenge is that I’ll be getting the same mail. Mind you, I’ve already had my share of both offers (plus the inheritance and lottery winnings) 100 times and counting…..
Jo
this is just not true, becos nothing goes for free. although i sent the mail. so i dicided to use google and i came across this website. and it gave me an affirmation.
I recieved the mail from an old friend and reading through it saw the falsity in it. Funny enough i live in Sweden and have been to the Ericsson Global Headquarters situated in the city of Lund it is interesting to note that the Last name of anna is derived from the combination of the first syllabul of the country name (Swe-den) and the name of the city (Lund). therefore we have anna.SWELUND it is all a hoax.
Doesn’t anyone get it??
Anna.swelung@ericsson.com
=
Anna is well hung at Ericsson.
My bet is there is some poor girl at Ericsson called Anna.
Thanks for the informations guys!
Damnit!
I am one of the foos who send the email about the $1 Bill Gates will give out to those who will send the email.
Shame on me!!!
wehehehehehe
There is no Anna Swelung at Erricsson - ske dosen’t excist!
http://www.ericsson.com/nl/pers/archief/persbericht_kettingmail.shtml
What makes me wonder is if Anna Selung doesn’t exist at Ericsson, how can she receive the spammed emails? How can a spammer clone an Ericsson domain for his email (*@ericsson.com)? Our victimed email adds should remain undelivered and there should be no viagra ads reaching our emails..
jv- at the simplest, the spammer uses “anna.swelung@ericsson.com” as a decoy; his/her actual e-mail address (in the To: or CC: field) is something like big_spammer@hotmail.com (ok, maybe something less obvious… but you get the point). He/she is betting that folks will Reply to All, in which case, he/she would have met his/her objective.
Now, remember that this is taking the simple, low-tech approach… imagine what a true hacker can do… with redirects, phishing, etc.
Very very interesting article! You describe very important theme. I’m going to discuss about it in my blog to my readers. Unfortunately I’m late to write the same article in my blog. In the web are a lot of same sites and blogs but your differs markedly of its profundity.
Taken from the Ericsson web site’s FAQ:
5: Is it true that you are giving away mobile phones? Please give me Anna Swelunds e-mail address.
No, Ericsson is not giving away phones for free. The chain letter is a
fraud.
[First published 10 April 2000]
A chain letter is currently in circulation via e-mail, purporting that
Ericsson is giving away mobile phones. The e-mail is a fraud and
Ericsson is not giving away phones for free. The following is an
extract from the letter:
“If you forward it [the letter] to 20 friends, you will receive a brand
new Ericsson phone.”
The letter is signed off Anna Swelund, Executive Promotion Manager
for Ericsson Marketing. This person does not exist at Ericsson. The
legal and IT departments at Ericsson will trace the person who
initiated the illegal chain letter. Ericsson is sorry for any inconvenience this might have caused and kindly ask people not to forward the chain mail further.
March 08 2008
Mrs Anna Swelund
Executive Promotion Manager
Sony/Ericcson
Object : Free offer Ericcson giveaway, under email.
Dear Mrs Anna Swelund,
Now I know the reason because no answer have been forwarded to me, concerning my last email sent and addressed to you, also as : Swelung instead of Swelund.
Now that I have visited the appropriated Ericcson web site, I understand the fact : circumstances provided from a hoax, a free offer must have been a phone, not a lap top.
The Doug’s answers window is well described, thank you.
Permit me to offer you and the Ericcson company, my sympathy for all the trouble you have had to confront or resolve this undesirable situation.
Hoping the practicals jokers are catched.
If ever we must get a lap top, we’ll look for an Ericcson brand.
Please, dear Mrs Swelund, accept our best regards.
Simon Dumais
“Connected in communications since 1947″
sdumais@globetrotter.net
Rimouski (Quebec) Canada
418-724-2880
Cc :
mffournier@globetrotter.net
marc.e@globetrotter.net
jdrouin31@hotmail.ca
rickden@this1.ca
vmessimeris@gmail.com
georgeliverakos222@hotmail.com
joc.h.ri.@cgocable.ca
degiemond@eastlink.ca
louis4×4@hotmail.com
renee.g@globetrotter.net
Yea Iv sent this damn e-mail to 20 people and after I’v read this article.
Thnx guys for the information I will be more careful the next time.
These spammers seriously suck man……. wasting our time….
kudos to the people who created this site…. it really gave people the chance to have freedom of speech.
These spammers seriously suck man……. wasting our time….
kudos to the people who created this site…. it really gave people the chance to have freedom of speech.
Don’t forget about the foreign lottery that you’ve supposedly won. The one that you don’t remember entering. That’s the spam that I get most often too.
blech.
H@ 3v3ry f00l b3l13v3 th1s sh1t, s0 1f 1 s3nt t0 y0u s0m3th1ng r1d1cul0U.S. l1k3 ”cl1ck h3r3 @nd g3t @ fuck1ng v1rus” y0ur3 g01ng t0 cl1ck, 1 c@n’t 1m@g1n3 th3 1gn0rat10n 0f th3 p30pl3.
p3@c3 0ut
I think it is a way to collect an Emailing list but with a new Idea for free ! these lists shouldn’t be for free but they only trying !!!
i called Ericsson and they know nothing about this “person”, they are not giving away nothing… don’t get caught…
You guys are such losers
Helloooooooooooo