[wine] Spanish scam artists on loose

Dear friends, I received today from Spain, via SNAIL MAIL, an offer many of us have gotten a dozen versions of via e-mail spam: there's a fortune tied up in court in a foreign country and if you help me get hold of it, I'll give you 40 percent, etc. I'm mentioning this to the wine board because the item strongly suggests to me that the scam artists got hold of the mailing list of the Spanish wine promotion agency (can't remember that agency's exact name, nor whether it's a government agency or trade association). A couple of observations: 1. Apparently this scam and its brothers and sisters are sufficiently effective that the scammers are able to spend well over a dollar per address looking for prospects. The item I received cost 0.78 Euros to mail, plus printer paper, envelopes, printer cartridges, employee labor, travel costs to the post office in Madrid, etc. The next item might be less amateurish; be alert. 2. Item #1 suggests that spam filtering software has gotten several orders of magnitude better than it used to be. Best regards, Russ