I have a not at all popular and rarely used blog. I still get dozens of stupid spam emails and comments a day and often some phone calls too. This would not have caught my attention for more than 10 seconds, if I even read it at all and it did not get filtered out by various spam tools.
I am quite perplexed at the people who panicked over this. It would probably rank 4th in the scariest things I have received today and seems on par with a call from the tax man claiming you owe them money and need to send them iTunes gift cards.
Imagine I dig a dangerous deep pit in my front lawn by the sidewalk.
99 out of 100 people are going to safely avoid it. 1 in 100 fall in and get severely injured.
I'm still at fault even though the injury only happens rarely. And a "rare" effect can harm a lot of people when you scale up the exposure far enough.
Those scam emails also cost a lot of people time and we rightfully outlaw them. In this case, it didn't fit the modality of the common scam messages, it looks a lot more like a professional litigant trying to set the recipient up for a lawsuit.
But in retrospect you guess this was spam would have been incorrect. It was a carefully crafted action by a researcher. Maybe their intuition was actually better?
I am quite perplexed at the people who panicked over this. It would probably rank 4th in the scariest things I have received today and seems on par with a call from the tax man claiming you owe them money and need to send them iTunes gift cards.