A lot of emails have been going around recently saying the following:

‘Starbucks is handing away holiday gift cards!’

This is a scam. Whatever you do don’t click on the link attached.

It’s a ploy to try and get you to fill out a fake survey designed to steal your personal details. To make matters worse they’ll even try and get you to post it all over your Facebook page and share it with your friends.

Before you know it your card will be used to purchase dozens of flat screen teles via a PO Box in Skegness.

I received several of these emails and one of them included the following passage as a ‘quote of the day’. This is mind boggling:

“tenderness, as a well-meaning man, but of a low contemptible in bygone days, for the furniture had more an air of comfort than currency of the realm, of the allying, at a later period”.

It sounds like an advert for DFS… written by a very drunk medieval playwright.

The reason I bring this up is because this kind of thing is appearing more and more.

Remember when I talked about autoblogging and dodgy software that scours the Internet for content and automatically posts it on blogs?

Well, this is the same thing – only this time it’s used on email. The hope is that a few of these randomly generated quotes will mean something to someone (this goes out to millions of people remember) and it will convince them it’s the real deal.

As always, if it looks dodgy, delete it.