Religious spam

Over the past couple of weeks, people have been reporting getting unsolicited messages via Facebook Messenger from various religious accounts. I got one myself, and thinking it was just ridiculous, immediately blocked the account. Here's a couple:

But it's been reported in Stuff, with a fairly good investigation done by Melanie Earley.

It seems that these messages have been blasted out en masse, with the hopes of drawing in at least a few people. This seems to be the online equivalent of door-knocking, though from reading the article in Stuff, it seems they are intent on extracting funds from people. That is, it's just a run-of-the-mill online scam, albeit with a religious bent.

The best advice is to just block the sender and report the message. But if you want to have a little fun and waste their time, perhaps you can engage.

And, speaking of religious spam, some of it takes a more traditional form…