Worst. Phishing Attempt. Evar.

[jeriendhal]

This is the body of an email I just received at work. Verbatim

* * *

Good day:
This message is from the Company_Name messaging center to all Company_Name email users.
We are currently updating our data base and e-mail center. All unused accounts will be deleted. To ensure that any active accounts are not deleted you are required to verify that your account is active by confirming your email identity. This will prevent your email from been closed during this process. In order to confirm your email address, click here.
Warning!!! Any Company_Name email user that refuses to verify and subsequently update his or her email within seven days of receiving this notice will lose his or her email privileges permanently.
Thank you for your assistance.

Comments

[resonant.livejournal.com]

Sadly, that reads like many e-mails from my company's IT director.

[scarfman]

I once got an email addresses to Dear %Firstname%

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

Trouble is, of course, they absolutely don't need to attract many responses - just one will be enough, as demonstrated here.

It could be quite interesting to have IT themselves send out something like that, and just see how many people respond..

[lilfluff]

I was just listening the other day to the Scams episode of You Are Not So Smart and it makes me wonder if this was intentional. Security researchers say these scammers intentionally craft their spam to make anyone even slightly likely to refuse the final push to hand over cash to self-reject. From what was said it can be a six month process to go from first email to actually getting the mark to hand over account information. With that much work involved you don't want to waste time on someone who will get cold feet at the last moment.

The (sadly paywalled) Wall Street Journal article about the paper giving that timeline is titled Why We Should Scam The Scammers; which I presume is from someone advocating intentionally wasting the scammers time in an attempt to make the workload untenable. Even a handful of people being hired to 'scam the scammers' could likely be a really nasty thorn in their sides.