Is It Really Spam?
The amount of spam that I receive everyday is absurd. All spam is stupid, but some is more stupid than others, and it amazes me how many emails I get from the widows of Sonny Abacha, Yassir Arafat, and various oil company executives, all offering a piece of the action if I help them transfer their millions out of their respective countries. These are the so-called 419 advance payment scams that we are all familiar with. At this point almost everyone on the planet must know about the scam and so you would think this type of email would be on the decline. But I seem to get more of them every day. Perhaps there is more to it than meets the eye.
One theory is that some of these are not spam at all. Embedded within their usual colorful prose are hidden messages that will only be noticed by those who know where to look. The rest of us will treat the emails as spam and ignore them.
In principle, it’s a simple and effective way to broadcast secret messages to members of a criminal gang or terrorist group. Anyone monitoring Internet traffic, even if they focused on emails received by a single address, would find it difficult to distinguish one piece of fake spam from the torrent of real spam that many of us receive every day. Even having achieved that, it would be impossible to identify the intended recipient among the thousands of other people who received the same message.
Spy novels from the Cold War era were full of agents passing messages to one another via cryptic classified ...
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