Let’s play a little detective/sleuthing game.

Examine this list of names:

Doria Aura, Mitzi Laquanda, Damien Louis, Deon Cantrell, Janna Loise, Ami Despina, Nobuko Stephen, Towanda Bronwyn, Farah Drema.

OK, what do they have in common? Or to put it another way, what do those names say to you?

OK, first off, what those names are not:

–My colleagues in the sports department at The National.

–The starting lineup of a co-ed softball team.

–The nine justices of the Supreme Court.

So, what are they?

The are the (almost certainly fake) names spammers attach to the junk that landed in my gmail “spam” file.

Spammers are the cockroaches of the internet, and I loathe them. They try to make a living by cheating people. Simple as that.

But I must concede they come up with some rather fun/silly names. Not real names, presumably, in the sense that “someone else is named this.”

That’s pretty inventive. For people who want to sell me powerful drugs,  or let me know I just won some strange lottery, or who want to give me a college degree (have one; thanks) or are keen to help me enlarge certain parts of my body.

Mitzi Laquanda? If you don’t think it through, sure, it could be someone’s name … but it almost certainly is not. Ami Despina, Towanda Bronwyn, Farah Drema … same thing. None of them are legit.

Inventing something that sounds like a name — but isn’t — probably is a semi-tricky thing.

But spammers are into trickery, aren’t they? Maybe it’s easier for them than I think.

Anyway, I had given them a couple of days to start stacking up in my spam file. And now I get to go over and give them the “delete forever” treatment.