Till now I have been getting tons and tons of spammy emails every day in my inbox just like you all. But very recently I received one spam mail which is a bit different from the others. For quite a long time I posted a few of my skill sets in my profile and this spammer was smart enough to realize that I have the required skill sets of a web designer. I must mention here that anyone joining our community can have a profile page.
The spam mail ..
This email looked a bit different from other spam mails.
- Subject: some information
- Signed by: yahoo.co.in
- To: xxxxx@hotmail.de
The body of the mail (stuffed with spelling mistakes) was pretty similar to other job offers and it said .. “We are looking for a fulltime employee, who exclusively will work for us …”. But then I discovered this .. “To convince us about your skills, we would like you to design some test layouts, similar to the examples we sent you in the attachment of this mail, but not a copy of them or others.” The mail concluded like this .. “thank you in advance and we hope we will receive your test-layout soon.” It also contained an attachment (like all other spam mails I guess), a word document with screenshots of some fairly renowned sites. They asked me to prepare layouts similar to these screenshots and send them so that they may have a look at my ‘actual skill sets’.
I was pretty surprised with this. But I replied to them asking for the url of their homepage. But they replied (!) by saying that they are about to launch a website! They also mentioned .. “We will select in few days the desingers. Pls send us this in few days,( test layout) with name xxx.”
My conclusion ..
I was pretty convinced that this is nothing but a nicely camouflaged trap for me. They gave the impression (in the first mail) that they are a pretty BIG web designing company. But they are yet to launch a web site! What I concluded from the whole episode was they wanted me to prepare some layouts for them which they would have used for some other purpose! So beware!!
Suggested reading:
- Hide multiple email addresses using Undisclosed Recipients option
- Your online privacy may be at stake, warns U.N. agency
