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9:01am on Monday, 4th March, 2024:
Anecdote
Mother's Day is approaching, and I'm now seeing ads and spam emails trying to guilt me into buying stuff. It's not going to work, because my mother died last year, but spammers neither know nor care about this. They ask me "Why not buy your mother flowers for Mother's Day?" but don't want to be told the answer. They just want to sell flowers, or at least give the impression that they do.
One particular kind of spam I'm seeing more of is the drip, drip, drip vairety. The idea seems to be that in order to persuade you that they're a legitimate company, the spammers send periodic emails; eventually, these become familiar and you accept the company as being real. They probably only want your credit card details for nefarious purposes, but they can be patient about when you give them it.
Now, in order to do this they need to send regular emails to build the recognition they need. Greetings cards are great for this! They can send their spam for occasions (graduations and weddings in summer) and for yearly events (Christmas, New Year, Valentine's Day, Easter, ...).
This could conceivably work, but somewhat entertainingly they make special offers to try to draw you in — but not ones that are too good to be true. 4 for the price of 3 is more like what a real company would offer, rather than 3 for the price of 2.
So, they just put a bunch of occasions, events and stock images into their spam machine to fill in the blanks on their template and off they go!
I'm sure that there must be some people who think 4 identical Mother's Day cards for the price of 3 is a good deal, but in general I suspect not.
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