Even for a spammer, that's stupid!

I just got a spam leaking through my blocks.

It was in English, with a number of really basic mistakes: using the wrong tense (typically, the past where the present would be correct), "any" instead of "many" or "some", "filed" where "field" is clearly intended, a missing article, a superfluous article, using the wrong preposition...lots of things making it appear to have been written by someone only semi-competent in English.

On the surface, it appears to be an ad. Looking deeper, it appears to be exactly what it looks like on the surface: the HTML portion contains no JS, no links, no way for the spammer to receive any benefit from it except a phone number, and the from domain matches the text reasonably well.

The reason this is noteworthy?

What it's spamvertising is translation services. One of the very few businesses for which I do not cut any slack on non-native English mistakes.

I can see only three ways this makes any sense at all. The first is that they're outright liars, claiming "professional native translation services" but lacking native Anglophones. The second is that they just couldn't be bothered to have one of their professional native Anglophones proofread their ad copy. The third is that it's a joe-job. I consider the last one easily the least likely of the three, largely because it was sent through salesforce.com, not some random botnet zombie. (It was also grossly mistargeted, talking about "expanding [the addressee's] global market" in a spam sent to an open-source software project's domain, but that's SOP for spammers.)

So, if anyone is considering using Mars Translation, marstranslation.co but with a Chinese (not Colombian) phone number, I recommend even more diligence than would normally be due.

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