Spam with bugs - LOL ;-)

I have received a very well done eBay phishing spam mail that made it through both of my spam filters. I took the time to actually read the thing. It has a pretty long winded explanation of why I owe eBay some money and goes on to say where I should transfer it and how much. The line stating the amount due contained a pretty funny error: Faelliger Gesamtbetrag: ||%RND_FIRST_DIGIT50,68 %RND_FIRST_DIGIT ?! LOL! I owe someone a random amount of money ;-) I can only assume that the original spam mail was generated in a different language (most likely english) and a different character set. I guess the dollar symbol was supposed to be replaced by a euro one and the parser choked on that. And, btw, we put our currency symbol at the end of the number, not in front anyways. On another note I stumbled across some malware recently that infects your machine and goes on to encrypt random pieces of your data. It then pops up a dialog telling you your data is being held hostage and that you have to pay a certain amount to get the password to unlock it again. I found this a very creative idea and wonder if they actually do earn money with it? More original than just deleting and destroying stuff randomly in any case. I guess with good open source encryption like: http://www.truecrypt.org/ it would actually be quite simple to write such a trojan that would work very well indeed.