monday september 7

today i received an email from one of my writers with the subject line "INVESTMENT PLAN," asking me to click on a google drive link called "LATEST INVESTMENT PLAN." recognizing immediately that this looked fishy, i trashed the email and sent him a new message with a screenshot of the email in question, letting him know that he probably had acquired some sort of spam-related virus or had been hacked or something. moments later, i received the following reply:

"Luke How are you? Yes, i sent it to you.. you maybe interested in the investment offer merrill Lynch is giving out.."

the response left me momentarily baffled. given the weird punctuation and wording, it obviously hadn’t been sent by my writer. but it also took about three minutes to arrive, meaning it wasn’t some sort of spam auto-reply. was a hacker just hanging out in his newly-conquered gmail inbox, doubling down on the original spam email by trying to encourage skeptics to click on it? i don't know how any of this works.