Monday, December 04, 2006

Fat Ioss

The following text is from SPAM e-mail I received:
Anatrim -- The newest and most exciting fat Ioss product available - As scen on Oprah

Did you know obesity kiIIs more and more people every year? We know you hate the extra pounds, the ugly look and the social stigmata attached to fat people. Moreover, you can barely do anything about the appetite. This all sounds familiar? Then we have something for you!

It may be difficult to detect, but in this case of reverse lowercase L discrimination, many of the lowercase L's are actually uppercase i's. I'm assuming the spammers are trying to keep up with spam filters, which may recognize offending word pairs like "fat loss" and "obesity kills", so they've changed "loss" to "ioss" and "kills" to "kiiis" (with uppercase i's in place of the lowercase L's). This switcharoo could go unnoticed if your default font is set to sans serif.

1 comment:

Nancy said...

Did it really say "social stigmata"?? Idiots meant STIGMA... stigmata is what people like jesus get. Oy.

I get so many of those emails and was wondering why they do the letter substitutions -- thanks for clearing it up!