Received 'suspicious' e-mail targeted at translators

Karin Gartshore wrote:

I just received the following e-mail:

************
You will earn 5 Euros per new translator recruited

Dear Translator Colleague,

Did you hear about the member recruitment reward programme
of the translator
directory “***.com”?

I am a translator as well and I would like to invite you to
sign up for
their “just-12Euros-per-year” member tariff as they offer
an outstanding
service and as I will receive 5 Euros per new translator,
who signs up for
this new tariff.

Of course you can do like me and invite more translator
colleagues, so that
you can earn a couple of hundred Euros just like that, too.
With more than
80,000 translators on the Internet you can get very lucky.

Apart from that, it is worth making use of their site. It’s
certainly one of
the best and they offer a great service.

Important advice:

To earn as well money through this member recruitment
reward programme, you
need to first sign up for their “just-12Euros-per-year”
tariff.

This reward programme is absolutely new, so if you invite
your colleagues
now(!) by e-mail or else, you will have most success. As I
said, there are
about 80,000 translators on the Internet. Imagine, if you
could contact them
all and your success rate of the invitations is at 10%, how
much you would
earn. I’d say: May the most convincing and fastest
translator gain the lot.

I would be very grateful if you could thank me for this
advice by mentioning
my e-mail address as “subject” when transferring your 12
Euro member fee to
***.com either by ***.com, ***Pal
or bank transfer.

Please fill in the subject box when transferring like
this:

1) [email protected], 2) [email protected]

My congratulations if you earn more through this reward
programme than me.

I wish you lot’s of success.

Yours sincerely,

Stephen ***
MA
*********************

My immediate reaction was negative, especially since they are urging translators to pay upfront to join the site
(which, IMO, has a funny smell about it, especially since it uses the 'snowball' system to generate cash). Also, the sender's English is a little questionable. Did anyone else get this?

Henry Hinds wrote:

Classic Spam. I also got it and just blew it away. Our e-mail addresses are there for all to see, but we don't have to bite.

Heinrich Pesch wrote:

what about those mails from \"Microsoft\" with socalled security updates? Do others get them too? I get half a dozen each day.
Someone should invent something to stop spam, otherwise we have to go back to snail-mail soon.