My name is Kurt and I live in Evansville, IN, I read your blog about Moldova and had some good laughs. I was wondering if you, in your intense study of Moldova, discovered why the Moldovian women like to inject the text from Harlequin romance novels into their Phishers. I got a couple from them that have Moldovian return paths and in their attempts to suck the life from my bank accounts, there they are throwing snippets of a romance novel into the fray. Maybe they cannot get any from the men because they are all tanked up on their apple jack , Or maybe the women are so sloshed on their martinis that they get lost in their coding.
Kurt

Interesting observation, Kurt. Maybe those Moldovan maids are using Harlequin snippets to bridge the language gap. For instance, over at http://heavenlyhearts.net, Tatiana from Kishinev admits that her English is “not so well yet.” She also says “I am a hopeless romantic and I hope I will meet the person who will be also romantic.” Sounds like a Harlequin reader to me!

Kurt’s question touches on something I’ve been wondering about: Moldovan exports. Officially, the country’s major exports are “agricultural and agro-processing goods.” But based on my blogging experience and five minutes of Google research, I suspect the main exports are actually spam and young women.

Like other former Soviet nations, Moldova offers the world’s bachelors a bumper crop of Irinas, Nadias, and Svetlanas, ready and eager for marriage and childbearing. Web resources like http://moldova.loveme.com/ not only serve as cyber-Yentas, they also offer letter-writing tips and fiancée Visa information. (Write to a lot of different women, but keep copies of your letters so you don’t get your gals mixed up.)

Nothing wrong with geeky American boys hooking up with hot European girls, right? Sure, the Moldovans are eager to flee the crappy local economy… But that’s not incompatible with true love. If everybody gets what they want, let’s all raise a glass of champagne.

However, there’s a dark side to this… actually two dark sides. First is the one Kurt referred to–phishers who take your dollars without any intention of introducing you to your own Anastasia. But the darker dark side is the exporting of women against their will. Often these women are forced into prostitution. The report I’ve found most specific to Moldova is Trafficking in Women: Moldova and Ukraine (2000, Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights), but many other organizations have produced reports on the plight of women from the region. Google for the grim details.

Compared to kidnapping, beating, and enslaving women, sending out unsolicited commercial e-mail, a.k.a. spam, seems fairly innocuous.

So we come down from Lost Lake smelling like we’d been camping for four days, which we had. We drive into Estes Park for burgers and wander into the Wapiti Pub and Restaurant. And we notice that all the young waiters and waitresses working there seem to have Eastern European accents.

We order our food–they offer elk burgers, but we both stick with beef–and I ask the waitress where she’s from. And that’s when the universe serves up a supersized coincidence with extra dippin’ sauce.

Moldova!

I badgered the poor young lady with questions. What was she doing in Estes Park, Colorado? She and her fellow Moldovans were on some kind of summer work program. She’s a college student in the capital city, Chisinau.

What did she know about Transnistria? Apparently, the place is a real dump. Poverty, poor infrustructure, etc. They’ve declared themselves an autonomous republic, but they’re still mooching off the Moldovan goverment for help with things like schools and roads. I asked her to explain how an “autonomous” republic could do that, and she said she didn’t really understand it herself.

I told her I was investigating Moldovan spammers. Did her country have a lot of spam? In response, she would only flash her crooked-toothed smile.

However, she was forthcoming on the subject of Moldovan booze. Young men back home will go to a bar and order whiskey and apple juice. (Google identifies this as cocktail called “apple jack.”) Young women drink something called “Martini Blanco.” (Though I located a picture, I still don’t know what it is.)

Slowly but surely, a picture emerges of life as a Moldovan spammer. Sipping apple jack while the giant junk servers hum late into the night, one eye on the window, knowing a mob of vigiliante bloggers could show up any minute. Transnistrian lay-abouts snatching at every Leu you make. (Current exchange rate: approx. $0.08 U.S.) Girls with expensive tastes in liquor in need of orthodontics.

Of couse, it’s possible the spammers there are women, in which case they have to feed their own white martini craving. Either way, I have sympathy for these people… a sympathy counterbalanced by the fact that I now have 63 junk comments in my moderation cue.

Well, Ms. K wrote saying she’d get back to me regarding Moldovan spammers. That was a week agon, and I had hoped to get a follow-up by now. But then, Ms. K has a complicated, energy-intensive social life.

While we wait, let’s check in with Wired, whose August issue includes The Sleazy Life and Nasty Death of Russia’s Spam King. Pity fast-living Vardan Kushnir, found in his bathroom with his head bashed in. Was it spam related? Not everyone thinks so, but come on–the guy was known and hated for his spamming. At least one Russian newspaper said he had it coming.

Makes me wonder. Maybe this is why my mysterious Moldovans stay on the down low–they like their skulls round and not so pulpy.

For a couple of days after my “Living in Moldova” post, I didn’t get any comment spam. I worried that I had offended the spammers of that proud-but-impoverished nation. But no, a few days later they were back!

Unfortunately, they declined my offer to post their links in return for information about life in Moldova. As far as I know, that offer is unique in the world of blogging. But some people just can’t be bothered.

I’m still curious about these Moldovan spammers. Are they impoverished techies just trying to put bread on the table? Ruthless Russian-style gangsters? Go-hung capitalists shaking off the dust of the old Soviet command economy?

On the off chance that spamming is illegal in Europe, I decided to check with Interpol. Not only did they not have any useful information, but their home page says they’ve got spam problems of their own:

Beware of fake email messages related to money transactions using Interpol’s name

Googling for information didn’t turn up much. I did find a tranny named Ms. K who left a comment on another tranny site about Moldovan spammers. As Ms. K seems to know a lot about IP blocks, htaccess and “pseudo captcha,” I thought she might be able to help me find out something about the Moldovans. But so far, she hasn’t written me back.

I haven’t posted here lately, but that doesn’t mean this site has been idle. I’ve got 15 comments in the moderations cue, waiting for me to approve them for display or delete them.

Sadly, they’re not real comments. They’re comment spam, also known as blog spam or spam in blogs. It works like this: the spammers (or more likely their software) get onto a blog and place a trival comment like “Wow that’s a nice post” to which is appended a link to some product or service.

I approved one such comment–it’s attached to the entry for Rock’em Sock’em Theater. The text makes it sound like the link will take you to a massage therapist in Miami, Florida, but the actual destination page is mostly gibberish. (Not sure why.)

Anyway, after I got more than a dozen of these things, I decided to try my hand at a little Internet sleuthing, to see if I could find out anything about the spammers. The trail seems to lead back to the small nation of Moldova, a former Soviet republic squashed between the Ukraine and Romania.

How cool is that! Somebody has been mucking with my Web site all the way from Moldova. I looked up Moldova in the CIA World Factbook, and found out the following:

• Before it was annexed by the Soviety Union at the end of World War II, it was part of Romania.
• The easternmost part of the country has declared itself a republic and goes by the name Transnistria.
• It’s either one of the poorest or the poorest nation in Europe (the CIA can’t seem to make up its mind).

So, greetings to visitors from Moldova! No, I’m not going to post your ads for bean bag chairs, cigar humidifiers, or “cell epilepsy stem study therapy” (whatever the hell that is). But tell me something about life in Moldova, and maybe I’ll approve your comment.

For instance: What kind of alcohol is most popular in Moldova?