Brazen Spammer Watch: A Buck to Unsubscribe

In what has to be one of the most brazen requests ever by a spammer, a Russian bulk e-mailer has been demanding that recipients send him a dollar to be removed from his list.

“To unsubscribe from this message you have to transfer only $1 into my purse, and we’ll remove your e-mail from the general database of messages,” says the e-mail purporting to be from Andrey Slabsonickiy. It then offers multiple ways the recipient can pay.

Would someone please tell us how to say “cojones” in Russian?

Then again, the spammer could be creating the mother of all Darwin Disks, a concept I first proposed in 2002.

The yet-to-be-implemented Darwin Disk is a theoretical co-op database of people who, by responding to certain kinds of spam, have identified themselves as so stupid, they should be naturally selected out of the legitimate marketing universe.

Using the Darwin Disk, spammers could have a file of all the idiots stupid enough to respond to their garbage and the rest of the e-mail universe would be mercifully clean of offers from online bottom feeders.

Anyone who sends Andrey a buck deserves a special place on the Darwin Disk: call it the “will send money to anyone who asks” file.