Jan 11, 2007
Help with total synthetic spam
Spam comes in all shapes and forms, so I am always suspicious when two emails identical in content and with attachments arrive that purport to be from two different correspondents. However, two such messages arrived this morning one claiming to come from a Dr Suhasini Bhatnagar, the other from Aarif Khatri. Normally, I’d let my spam filter do its job and trash such messages, but my interest was piqued by the subject line, which read “help regarding synthesis”. Often spam arrives with two random words stuck together that are supposed to beat spam filters, but three is rare and even less frequent are subject lines that make logical sense and simultaneously are pertinent to my interests.
So, I read on…
This is what Dr Bhatnagar (and presumably his chemistry supervisor, Prof Khatri) had to say:
“I was looking for help regarding the organic synthesis of a compound…I am doing My DSc from Agra University and the first part of work lasting now for past 3 years was involving Bioinformatics and its now that i need to synthesise the organic diketone type of compound [4-(2,4-dioxopentyl)benzoic acid] and I do not know how. Can you please help me design a simple reaction wherein I can get a few grams of the compound. I have very very limited resources and also knowledge in the subject. Your help would be greatly appreciated.”
Now, it is too far in the dim and distant past when I last did a retrosynthetic analysis, so I’m going to duck out of taking up his offer, but I wondered whether any Sciencebase readers could shed any light on the relevance of this compound and whether or not a total synthesis would be readily accessible. Your comments may also enlighten me as to whether these emails were nothing more than an intricate social engineering endeavour and that I’ve been duped into responding in this way.
I hope not.
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James Dale said,
January 13, 2007 at 10:01 pm
Hi,
I also just received the e-mail you are talking about. I too was taken by the subject line, it is rare to have a spam e-mail that actually has a sensible subject line. Also, my interest in chemistry and curiosity made me open the e-mail. In answer to your question, the compound would easily be made in several simple steps. So the choice of structure (requiring several steps for commercial starting materials) and the writers apparent lack of synthetic knowledge seem to fit. As for the reason for making the compound, that I am unsure about. I’m going to look further in to it out of my own interest now.
James.
Trish said,
March 21, 2007 at 5:37 pm
Milo over on Chemical Musings gave this post a mention and generated several answers (obviously there are no synthetic organic chemists reading Sciencebase or else they just didn’t feel like helping out). Anyway, here’s a link to Milo’s discussion.
Aarif Khatri said,
July 26, 2007 at 8:14 pm
Hi David, please don’t misunderstand the email we sent to you was a genuine inquiry. Dr. Suhasini is my wife and we are working seriously on our research topic. The second email was from me as a reminder since Suhasini didnt receive a reply she asked me to send one mail from my side. In fact if you can help us we have another compound which is simpler and it needs to be synthesized too. The earlier one was scrapped I am afraid. I look forward to hearing from you. Hope this clears the spam controversy.
Regards,
Aarif Khatri
David Bradley said,
July 26, 2007 at 8:58 pm
Aarif, nice to hear from you. I must correct a misunderstanding. I sent an immediate reply to the very first email I received from your wife, despite the fact that I was later to learn of a colleague receiving a similar email and my suspicions about the email being spam having been aroused. I must say, given that the original structure was scrapped I’m so glad I haven’t been spending any time working on it! Good luck with your quest.