I received the following email about 2 weeks back:

From: “Irene Julia” <irene.julia@gmail.com>
To: [deleted]

Sent: Wednesday, June 13, 2007 1:54 AM
Subject: Fwd: Free PDA+GSM Palm

Dear Friends,

Here is to announce that our company Palm, Inc., headquarter is located in Sunnyvale, California US opens our marketing office in Kuala Lumpur for Asia region. We are promoting our product and for the detail you can visit: 

http://www.palm.com/id/products/smartphones/

For first launching of our product in Malaysia, we will give away for free the new product of PDA+GSM Palm Type Treo 650 and Treo 680 and Treo 750.

By giving the product of PDA+GSM , we will get valuable feed back from the customers and get the mouth to mouth advertising.

You only have to forward to 15 people. After 2 weeks you will receive a PDA+GSM Palm Type Treo 650. If you forward to 25 people, you will receive a PDA+GSM Handspring Type Treo 680. And if you forward to 40 people you will get a PDA+GSM Palm Type Treo 750.

The only thing to remember is to send cc (copy) to:

louise.jasmine@gmail.com

Only by sending email to this address, we know you have forwarded this massage to your friends.

Good Luck!!

Louise Jasmine

Executive Promotion

Kuala Lumpur Office

Palm, Inc.

Email:

Private : louise.jasmine@gmail.com
Business: louise.jasmine@palm.com

After explaining to the sender that it’s most likely a hoax, I keep getting the same email back from different persons.

Even though I can’t find references to it the usual way, it still sounds suspicious for the following reasons:

• why she used a free email account to send this instead of palm.com corporate email?
• why is the email sent by a Ms Irene Julia, while it was signed by a Ms Louise Jasmine?
• why she linked to Palm’s Indonesian website instead of Palm’s Malaysian website?
• neither Palm US, nor Palm Indonesia, nor Palm Malaysia website mentioned any such promotion/marketing campaign.
• spelling and grammatical errors

I contacted Palm Corp US, Hong Kong and Singapore to confirm whether this is an authentic offer via their listed email address a few weeks ago, unfortunately I haven’t received any reply yet. Email addresses for Palm Malaysia & Indonesia are not listed.

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