Every morning I wake up to my usual assortment of emails--a few social media updates, daily deal schedules, and the occasional followup email from someone that I happened to meet that particular week. But today I was excited to find in my inbox a rare gem that doesn't usually make it through Gmail's spam filter these days, a phishing email.

"Why are you excited about being phished?" you might ask. Really its because I like to think of phishing as an art form, and it is. So I like to take note of finely crafted scams, designed to steal money/information/dignity from me.

But when I opened up the email I didn't find that. I found utter laziness:

1. Non-spoofed email address - It's so easy to fake your email address these days, that spoofing is a must for phishing. I remember back in 2000, the first big time phishing scam was PayPaI.com (spelled with a capitol "i"). At least those guys put some thought into authenticating the email a little more.
2. Non-personalized greeting - Not all companies use personalized greetings, but most of the big ones do (usually with your full name or account name).
3. Non-manipulated URL link - When phishers have chosen poorly targeted domain names to direct the phishee to, the best thing to do is manipulate the link with an '@' symbol. It's an old method, but can still look to be relatively authentic.
4. Non-working URL link - Now this is just plain stupid. The phisher here forgot to add an 'x' in the 'index.html' part of the anchor. So even if I were to try and "restore my account" by clicking on the link, I wouldn't even be able to access the forged website.
5. ASCII graphics - Most email templates from well known companies use HTML templating with CSS'd images for beautified emails. Images can take a lot of resources, but at least things like horizontal lines used in this email should be made with an 'hr' tag.
6. Faux Footer - A nice authentic-looking footer helps a lot with the phishing scam. The one created here is fragmented and overly complex. A simple copy and paste from an official PayPal email would have sufficed.

• BONUS - Upon fixing the linked URL, I discovered that the would-be forged website is not a forged PayPal site at all, but instead a link to the schedule of a Russian church. Oh, and it's IN RUSSIAN!

There's so many things here that have led this phish to be a big #FAIL. But while I didn't get the art-y scam I was hoping for, I did get a good laugh.

Cheers lazy phisherman!