Monday, March 28, 2005

This has got to be a joke

I got this e-mail message today:
D‮ae‬r Ba‮syalcr‬ Me‮ebm‬r,

T‮sih‬ e‮am‬il was se‮tn‬ by the B‮yalcra‬s s‮re‬ver to v‮re‬ify y‮ruo‬ em‮lia‬ ad‮sserd‬. You m‮su‬t c‮pmo‬lete t‮sih‬ pr‮sseco‬ by cl‮ikci‬ng on the l‮kni‬ bel‮wo‬ and ent‮gnire‬ in the s‮llam‬ w‮dni‬ow yo‮ru‬ Barcla‮sy‬ Member‮hs‬ip numb‮re‬, p‮edocssa‬ and m‮rome‬able w‮ro‬d.

Th‮si‬ is d‮eno‬ for y‮ruo‬ protec‮it‬on - b‮suace‬e s‮emo‬ of our memb‮re‬s no lon‮eg‬r h‮eva‬ acc‮sse‬ to the‮ri‬ e‮am‬il a‮serdd‬ses and we m‮tsu‬ ver‮yfi‬ it. To v‮ire‬fy y‮uo‬r e‮liam‬ a‮erdd‬ss and acc‮sse‬ y‮uo‬r b‮na‬k a‮occ‬unt , b‮na‬k a‮occ‬unt , clikc on the lnik bolew: ...
I've gotten some bad spam before, but this is ridiculous...

4 comments:

Jonathan Benda said...

Ok... this is weird. I'm looking at my blog in IE and the weird Barclay's letter is now almost perfect. (Almost.) Has my blog been "corrected"? And by whom???

Jonathan Benda said...

So it looks like if I look at the quoted e-mail in IE it's OK, but if I look at it in Firefox its's all weird... any idea why that happens?

Luke Francl said...

Wow, that's crazy.

My guess?

It's probably exploiting an IE bug to make it look right. Firefox doesn't suffer from the bug so it displays differently. Some Unicode characters look the same, but have a different character code. I don't know why Firefox doesn't suffer from the same problem.

Why do they do this? Because these unicode characters will throw off spam filters, but for the 90% of the people using IE, it will look right.

Jonathan Benda said...

Aha! I think. (That is, I think I understand what you're saying.) Anyway, it sets my mind at ease knowing I'm not the only person who sees two different versions of the same e-mail!