How to Spot a Psychopath

The latest product of what I presume to still be the SpamThru botnet is a cavalcade of come-ons for an alleged mine for alleged gold in alleged Africa.

They're piling up in news.admin.net-abuse.sightings already; I've had a couple of dozen of them, as usual all from different servers.

The same objection applies here as it did to the previous outbreaks - not many people are likely to find an offer more appealing if they get numerous copies of it with slight subject line variations.

This one differs in that it's promoting a Web site, rather than a penny stock. The site (for the "Land Resource Association LLC" - I just added that so Google searchers can find this page) looks more than scammy enough to actually want to be promoted in this way, so I doubt this is a Joe Job.

Apparently, they're pulling about $US360,000 worth of gold out of the ground a month, so obviously they, um, need investors to send them money, so that they can... hmm.

It's not even clear what country they're pretending to be mining in. Maybe Ghana. In that case, the amount of gold they claim to be digging up now equals the GDP per capita of something like 8400 Ghanaian citizens. That's a lot of labour and machinery buying power in a country with 20% unemployment.

But never mind that. Invest! Invest now! Don't miss out on your one chance in a lifetime to be ripped off by this particular scam!