Hook

I have to admit to a certain curiosity about things like this. What "Pfizer vaccine reward" does the party than sent this e-mail think that people are expecting, or hoping for? While it's fairly clear that they're attempting to keep up with the times, and capitalize on current events, I find myself wondering what they think they mean.

I suspect that most of these sorts of e-mails are simply cast out into the void on a wing and a prayer. With the costs of sending them being effectively zero, even a desperately poor person in some stricken part of the world can hope that someone clicks on a link and renders themselves vulnerable to ransomware or is drawn in to an advance fee scam. Maybe they're counting on finding one of the ten thousand people who are new to internet fraudsters and criminals. I was wondering aloud to a friend if, perhaps, a lot of the illicit e-mails that land in people's inboxes are just the output of abandoned scripts that people wrote, deployed, gave up on and then never shut down.

For all that people think of cyber-criminals as masters of their craft, most of what's out there is stuff just like this. Sure, the venerable 419 scams live on, with people claiming to be bankers in Africa saying that they're looking for someone to help them smuggle millions off the continent, with only a few up-front fees to be paid, but they seem to have been long overtaken by messages that just seem random.

I supposed that there stereotype of the wealthy, but easily gulled, westerner persists in other parts of the world. And it likely doesn't take all that many people flashing money siphoned from scam targets to entice the world's poor into trying it out for themselves. After all, they only need that one big score, right? And with modern automation able to blast e-mails around the globe in short order, it's not a lot of work. I suppose that everyone likes a get-rich-quick scheme.