Phishing

I was the lucky recipient yesterday of a piece of email claiming to be from the folks at Hotmail warning me that I was about to lose that account.  They desperately needed to know just a few small pieces of information about me in order to keep the account open.  Little minor things, like my date of birth, snail mail address, and, oh, just for shits and gigles, how about a credit card number? 

The message was, of course, riddled with spelling errors and grammatical mistakes.  Does anyone, anywhere, ever fall for this crap?  Someone must, because otherwise why bother, but it still astounds me that anyone would, especially when Hotmail is one of those free services that, like gmail and a bunch of others, never asks a new user to do more than make up a name and a password. 

Then again, when you have a whole generation of people who do most of their writing using odd abbreviations, maybe seeing "plez provide ur. . ." in a supposedly serious piece of correspondence wouldn't cause them to spew coffee all over the keyboard.