Is this a spambot, or is my memory bad?

April 26, 2013 8:00 AM

Earlier today I got a message from an address and name I didn't recognize with no text and "Hiii@" as the subject. 'This is clearly spam' I thought, and marked it as such. About 15 minutes later I get a gchat invitation from the same person. I shrugged, and decided to answer it. The conversation seemed real enough, and there was no enticement to do anything like click on a link or buy some scammy product. I'm racking my brain and still can't place the name. Is this a spam bot, or a real person?

The conversation:

her: whoa finally!

me: who's this?
10:32 AM
her: [first name]

b

[other last name, redacted]?
10:33 AM
me: sorry, that's not ringing any bells

erica: that is bizarre

ok

sorry at that

abt*

And then she blocked me, I presume.

posted by codacorolla to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Either it's some weird comeon, in which case, you're not biting.

Or it's some chick who thinks she knows you. You don't. Now she's gone?

It could be a real person who was given a fake email and gchat in a bar. (the old 'fake phone number' gag.)

Do you have a common gmail name?

Either way, I doubt it'll happen again.

Sometimes people get their wires crossed.
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 8:11 AM on April 26, 2013

I can't imagine a spam bot would have the capacity to recognize that you were denying knowledge of her identity and then apologize and move on. I would say it's a real person. Either she got you innocently confused with someone she knew or else she was a scammer of some sort fishing for potential suckers and quickly realized that you weren't going to play.
posted by tdismukes at 8:12 AM on April 26, 2013

Sounds like she mixed up your email address with someone else's.
posted by doctornecessiter at 8:12 AM on April 26, 2013

Looks like the internet equivalent of a wrong number to me.
posted by ook at 8:20 AM on April 26, 2013

Response by poster: I guess it is... my gmail account (first initial, very uncommon last name) would be hard to get confused though.

Maybe this has something to do with the mailing list for a lesbian nightclub in L.A. that I was unknowingly signed up for a year ago...
posted by codacorolla at 8:24 AM on April 26, 2013

I guess it is... my gmail account (first initial, very uncommon last name) would be hard to get confused though.

My gmail account is of the same form, and my last name isn't common (the frequency was about 1 in 25,000 in the 1990 census). I've never personally met or heard of another person with my last name who was outside my family. Yet this still means that there are well over 10,000 people in the U.S. with my last name, and I often get unintended e-mails when one of them gets mixed up about their e-mail address. When you include the possibility of misspellings, mis-transcriptions, and so forth, and my vote is definitely for a "wrong number".
posted by Johnny Assay at 9:30 AM on April 26, 2013

If you haven't already, search your gmail for her address. Gmail has this annoying default rule of saving everyone you ever email as a contact, so it's possible that you bought a chair from her on Craigslist or something and she has you in her contacts and accidentally emailed you instead of the person she was trying to reach.
posted by payoto at 10:09 AM on April 26, 2013