So while going through my latest collection of e-mail spam I discovered the gem below. At first I thought it was a chain e-mail and it caught me by surprise, since I haven’t gotten one of them in a while. Then I realized that it was just a new variation on the lame fake lottery scams.

COCA-COLA ONLINE PROMOTIONS!!!

THE COCA COLA COMPANY Hong Kong office is Giving Away 1 cars For “FREE”!! And cash bonus of $800,000.00
The Company is trying e-mail to e-mail advertising to introduce its products.

The reward you received for advertising for them is a Mercedes-Benz, ML class jeep convertible free of cost! Including cash prize of $800,000,00

To receive your free car all you need to do is send us your

1. Full name:
2. Address / contact number:
3. Country of origin:
4. Occupation:
5. Email:

Within 1 month you will receive a free car. A draw has just been concluded in Hong Kong last weekend
(we contacted you via your email address).

You must send your contact information to,<removed> OR <removed>

Kind Regards,
Sandy Robert
Sales /Marketing Manager
coca cola Asia
Hong Kong

While I know that most of the folks who read this are probably savy enough to recognize this as utter crap, for the education of the less savy folks who may be reading (you probably found this blog because you just couldn’t get enough about Anna Nicole Smith’s death, and to you I say welcome and good job on figuring out how to use a search engine! :D ) you’ll find my commentary on this message when you “Continue Reading”

So lets start at the top, shall we:

THE COCA COLA COMPANY Hong Kong office is Giving Away 1 cars For “FREE”!!

So this e-mail is from THE COCA COLA COMPANY Hong Kong office, not The Coca Cola Company as it’s listed on the official Coca Cola website for Hong Kong www.icoke.hk. Why would Coke in Hong Kong want to give me a car for free when I’ve never been to Hong Kong and don’t have any influence over the Hong Kong consumers?

The Company is trying e-mail to e-mail advertising to introduce its products.

What the heck is e-mail to e-mail advertising? I’ve heard of e-mail advertising campaigns but not e-mail to e-mail campaigns, and better yet I find it hard to believe that a major global corporation like Coke is going to send me an e-mail for some advertising campaign that’s just a rich text message… No HTML, no pretty pictures, NO COKE LOGOS! Pretty weak!

The reward you received for advertising for them is a Mercedes-Benz, ML class jeep convertible free of cost! Including cash prize of $800,000,00

Ka Ching!!!! $800k and a free Mercedes! Wait a second… the car I would be getting is a Mercedes-Benz ML class jeep convertible? Hmmm, Mercedes makes an ML class SUV, 4 different models of it too… but none look very jeep like, and there’s nothing convertible about them….

 

To receive your free car all you need to do is send us your

1. Full name:
2. Address / contact number:
3. Country of origin:
4. Occupation:
5. Email:

Translation: If you send us the information we request, we’ll add you to our sucker’s list so that we can continue to send you junk and try and find ways to seperate you from your money…

You must send your contact information to,cocacolahongkong@fatearn.com OR sndyrbrt@yahoo.com

I purposely removed the e-mail addresses from the original e-mail but decided to add them here. My thinking is that if you made it this far in the post than you know that the e-mail is totally bogus, plus maybe the content scrapers that feed the spambots will pick up on these two e-mails and send them lots of crap… But just in case you’re not convinced, why would The Coca Cola Company send an e-mail out as part of a marketing campaing and not have people respond to an e-mail address that belongs to the company? Just who is fatearn.com and I’m positive that Coke makes enough money to own their own e-mail domain and doesn’t need to use Yahoo mail for one of it’s employees!