To be impressed by onanism?

[MothershipG]

I get loads of spam to my work email account, mostly trying to sell me viagra and recently quite a lot in chinese, but today I received this...

I write you bесausе I put a mаlwarе оn the web раge with porn which yоu hаve visitеd.
My virus grabbed аll yоur persоnal info and turned on your сamеrа which cаptured thе prоcess of yоur onаnism.

Obviously the product of google translate or similar but after a quick canvas of my colleagues it turned out no one else actually knew what it meant. So I don't think this particular blackmail spam is going to be very lucrative, but it gave me a chuckle.

Are you feeling OK? they've got your onanism. Call 101 and have it logged.

It's 75% of my sex life.
I can't imagine it being of interest to anyone else.

On a more serious note: there is a (not entirely absurd, IMO) hypothesis that scammers deliberately make their emails sound somewhere between unlikely and downright stupid. The reasoning behind it is that only the pathologically naive or somewhat dimwitted would fall for something like this and that this helps spammers lower the response rates among people who are more likely to jump ship at a later stage (i.e. time wasters from the fraudsters' POV). It actually makes good business sense, providing you're morally bankrupt scum looking to make money out of other people's naiveté.

If they're in the porn industry, surely they should be paying you?

Preying on the vulnerable then :(

Knew what you were talking about the second I read the title. That's the advantage of going to a church school. You know the dirty bits in the Bible.

@DilianaDilemma

I think there is a flaw in that theory in this instance as I doubt the pathologically naive or somewhat dimwitted would know what onanism meant, or bother to look it up.

I have no idea what it means. I imagine Ross in friends hissing it though

I got a very similar email last week, only it said they'd remotely filmed me doing 'nasty things. REAL nasty things.'

Apparently they were going to send the imaginary footage to everyone on my contact list.

Stealth it means masturbate.

Nalder I had a Catholic education, don't non-religious schools teach these very useful words?...I shall go ask my heathen teenagers...

I know what it means. I'm proper in my indecency.

@MothershipG, well, not everyone is good at their job, are they? Not even criminals ...

More to the point, there is a veritable scamming industry in parts of Africa - most famously so Nigeria - where quite a lot of this stuff tends to originate from. And a noticeable geographical overlap with areas with a relatively high prevalence of what Europeans, more so than US Americans, would classify as 'charismatic' types of Christianity. Hence the various churchy type scammers (often from the Reverend such-and-such).

In other words: if you're assuming - based on your own background - that 'onanism' would be something preached about in church on Sundays (and that you actually go to church ...), it's not an absurd assumption to make.

Funny enough, Christian charity never really seems to present much of an issue ...

... and, yes, I can totally geek out on this subject. It's a professional interest, but I also find it fascinating from a psychological as well as a technology perspective.

I'll STFU now.

Ode to Onanism.

Lol I thought it was orgasm spelt wrong!

Dolly Your spammers obviously didn't learn about WOW words at school.

Diliana Don't STFU, you are very interesting and informative.

ProfYaffle I have to wonder why you have a link to a song about masturbation to hand...

It's one of the words Harvey Denton in 'The League of Gentlemen' used when lecturing Benjamin about what he did and didn't allow "in this house".

It's often treated as referring to masturbation, but I understand it probably referred to coitus interruptus (withdrawal) since he "spilt his seed on the ground" which was a way of avoiding pregnancy, therefore reducing the numbers of the tribe or race. Increasing the population was important in the days it was written.

I don't know if the apparent mistranslation was deliberate, to discourage masturbation in the days when it was disapproved of.

PigletJohn I only found that out today, I'd only ever read it in reference to wanking. Everyday is a school day. 😊

@MothershipG, fair enough, ready to up the geeking-out ante!

For anyone vaguely interested in co-geeking on the issue: AFAIK this is the original research paper that posited the 'scammers are sounding like bleeding morons in order to maximise return on investment' hypothesis. It's from Microsoft's researchers:

Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They are From Nigeria?

It's positively ancient in terms of tech history (2012) and some of the details of how the script works have been amended somewhat (though the oldie and goodie Nigerian Prince is very much still a thing). It's also worth noting that other internet fraudsters, e.g. hackers targeting corporate employees, employ entirely different strategies, such as attempting to impersonate the target's internal IT department. The basic tenets still very much hold true, though, IMO.

It's fascinating stuff, and a surprising amount of people actually fall for it, provided the bait is tailored to the intended target. I've recently had my own team phishing-tested and, despite them all being regularly trained on this kind of stuff, had a shockingly high failure rate of over ten percent.

Rough estimates of online scamming 'revenues' run into the hundreds of millions to billions pa just from the targeting of private citizens. There is possibly an even higher potential from corporate targets, who - for reasons such as image, public confidence and the resulting impact on share prices - are assumed to be very reluctant to go public with incidents unless absolutely forced to.

Thank god I went to a comp.

I got a similar email and just deleted it.

@mothershipG

I no longer take much interest is religions, but Genesis 38 is the passage. Having checked, it seems perfectly clear to me that it is referring to coitus interruptus

7 And Er, Judah's firstborn, was wicked in the sight of the LORD; and the LORD slew him.
8 And Judah said unto Onan, Go in unto thy brother's wife, and marry her, and raise up seed to thy brother.
9 And Onan knew that the seed should not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother's wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother.
10 And the thing which he did displeased* the LORD: wherefore he slew him also"

Wasn't it Dorothy Parker who called her canary Onan because he used to spill his seed on the floor ?

@drudgewithagrudge, I hope this is true - and I'm not about to google it on the grounds that I may be disappointed if I find it's an urban myth. Genius!

Posh word for wanking. Meh.

😂