So there I was, complaining the other day that for the most part, people who filled in a list of spam comments were just sending me a list of links to whatever it was they were trying to get google juice for (even if the use of rel="nofollow" on all links in comments means that they wouldn’t actually get any google juice anyway), and that now you didn’t get any of the little ’spam stories’, and there wasn’t really any attempt to disguise spam as not actually spam any more.

But obviously the spammers have been listening to me, and have adapted their techniques accordingly. I have recently quite a few variations on this theme (about a dozen in the last two days):

Hey. The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.

I am from Great and now teach English, give please true I wrote the following sentence: “A list of some of the current travel deals for cheap airline tickets.”

With love :o, Eleanor.

Spammer

Good morning. Obscurity is a good thing. You can fail in obscurity. It removes the fear of failure.

I am from Kuwait and bad know English, give please true I wrote the following sentence: “Forget what you once knew about booking cheap airline tickets.”

Waiting for a reply :p, Zetta.

Spammer

I don’t know why spammers feel the need to use such terrible English. Surely the amount it would cost them to actually get someone who is capable of writing something in reasonable English would be off-set by the increased percentage of spam which people didn’t actually realise was spam? Although I probably shouldn’t be giving them tips…

But I like this one. It’s still obviously spam, but at least it’s different. In this case the poor English could even be deliberate. The premise is that person X wants you to tell them how good (or not) their English is, only they have happened to use a common, everyday phrase like “deals for cheap airline tickets”. Hmm, right. I wonder where their URL link goes?

And I particularly like the fact that Eleanor is from “Great”. That’s just … great.