Like most people, I still got those phishing emails about someone wanting to share millions with me from an account in some bank abroad that mysteriously has nobody else to inherit it.\u00a0 I marvel at how badly written they tend to be, aside from the fact that they’re ridiculous.<\/p>\n
I also get persistent warnings from banks I don’t have accounts with that there’s been suspicious activity and the account has been frozen until I verify my identity by clicking…wherever.<\/p>\n
I see these on my PC, btw.\u00a0 I don’t tend to check email on my tablet and I only use a\u00a0 smart phone when I’m traveling abroad and need GPS and other information. The junk is mostly on my Comcast account because Gmail does a much better job of filtering spam.<\/p>\n
As an author with two web sites, I receive slightly more targeted spam email than the kind mentioned above, and it comes via contact forms on those websites. Everyone in the world seems to want to get me more hits, more followers, more money, and change my writer’s life forever.<\/p>\n
I usually don’t read more than a line before deleting them, but sometimes I’m drawn in by the sheer audacious stupidity, and they can make my day.\u00a0 Here’s a beauty from this morning, sent via the contact form on my author web site levraphael.com:<\/p>\n
Hi, If you need articles for your website make sure you let us know. We have an excellent team of writers and we always deliver fast usually within hours. And we have a special right now for you to try out our service for only $1 an article!<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I’ve omitted the web site link, but it had the word “factory” in it.\u00a0 I wonder why their excellent team of writers apparently working 24\/7 didn’t catch the run-on sentence.<\/p>\n
Seriously, though, if there was a real person as opposed to a bot behind this email, I’d thank them and then explain that I’ve published hundreds (yes, hundreds) of short stories, essays, book reviews, and blogs.\u00a0 I’ve also published twenty-five books in a dozen different genres, which have been translated into fifteen different languages.<\/p>\n
So I don’t need speedy, cheap content for my web site.\u00a0 I wouldn’t mind a personal assistant, though.\u00a0 To delete the spam.<\/p>\n
Lev Raphael teaches unique creative writing workshops online at writewithoutborders.com<\/a>.\u00a0 <\/strong>\u201cStudying creative writing with Lev Raphael is like seeing ‘Blade Runner’ for the first time: simply incredible.\u201d–K. Roberts, Michigan<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Like most people, I still got those phishing emails about someone wanting to share millions with me from an account in some bank abroad that mysteriously has nobody else to inherit it.\u00a0 I marvel at how badly written they tend to be, aside from the fact that they’re ridiculous. I also get persistent warnings from … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1637],"tags":[1640,497,217,885,1259,216,1639,1642,504,192,496,98,506,1638,1641,242,290,214,1219],"class_list":["post-4309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-writers-life","tag-author-web-sites","tag-authors","tag-comedy","tag-creative-writing","tag-http-writewithoutborders-com","tag-humor","tag-phishing","tag-phishing-email","tag-promotion","tag-publicity","tag-publishing","tag-satire","tag-social-media","tag-spam","tag-spam-email","tag-teaching-creative-writing","tag-the-writers-life","tag-the-writing-life","tag-writewithoutborders-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4309"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5525,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4309\/revisions\/5525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}