Nigerian 419 scams: some fun with Wordle

by Graham Cluley on October 14, 2008 | Comments Off

Filed Under: Spam

Have you Wordled yet?

Wordle is a fun little web app that will take a bunch of words or an RSS feed and convert it into an (often beautiful) word cloud. It's a fun way to spend an idle few minutes.

I was messing around with it for a while, and wondered what 419 scams (the notorious "Letters from Nigeria" that plague many people's inboxes, trying to con you out of money) would like in a word cloud. So, I took about 25 randomly picked scam emails and shoved them into Wordle.

Here's what I ended up with..

scam-cloud

I'm surprised that Nigeria wasn't a more commonly used word. Mind you, my sample size was very small. Maybe it would have been more significant if I had used many more examples of email scams.

I also gave Wordle the RSS feed for this blog to see what it would come up with..

blog-cloud

What's the point of all this? I'm not sure. But it was fun. :)

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About the author

Graham Cluley is senior technology consultant at Sophos. The readers of Computer Weekly voted him security blogger of the year in 2009 and 2010, and he pipped Stephen Fry to the title of "Twitter user of the year" too. Which was nice. He was also named "Best Security Blogger" by the readers of SC Magazine in 2011. You can subscribe to Graham's updates on Facebook, follow him on Twitter and circle him on Google Plus for regular updates.