Slashdot Mirror
Some Spammer Has a Crush on You
A friend of mine and I were bit by SomeoneLikesYou in the last week. The scam is elegant in its simplicity. The site teases you with an email claiming to know someone who likes you, then makes you guess who it might be by submitting their email address(es). Each of those addresses receives a teaser email just like yours. Rinse, repeat. I ignored the message -- obviously a fake; I couldn't possibly be anyone's crush :-) -- but my friend took the bait and fed it some demographic data and email addresses. Once she realized what was going on, she wrote to everyone apologizing for any spam they may have received. She also sent a nastygram to the site's operators.
It should be pointed out that there is no proof that SomeoneLikesYou is doing anything nefarious with the data they're collecting. However, their credibility is not strengthened by their faked WHOIS records and their meaningless doubletalk on privacy issues (the declaration, "We send precisely zero e-mail advertisements," says nothing about the behavior of their partners/affiliates.)"
yay! Kirsten Dunst rules!
I sent in my money and all she sent me was spam. And here I thought she was going to send me a nude pic and hours of hardcore action.
Karma whorin' since 1999
I've seenthese, and have wondered if these sites ever really tell you where they got your address. I.e., I suspect that they start with a list like every other spam-oriented site or company, but if I enter my friends email, and she guesses correctly that I'm the one with the crush, does the site say so? Or does it let you keep dumping email addresses in there till you tire of it (and they have more addresses)...something tells me it's the latter. ;)
I just checked my logs and it appears that my antispam software just deleted a message about someone who likes me without me getting a chance to read it. Maybe its time to go back to the old method of just hitting delete now that the carpal tunnel syndrome is almost gone on the finger I use on the delete key.
I have an e-mail address that I have used to register for exactly one thing: AOL Instant messenger. I've never sent any other e-mail through this account, I've never published the address on the internet, or anywhere else for that matter. Yet apparently someone who has a crush on me has managed to get that e-mail address and report it to Crushlink! I don't even want to log on to the site to get onto their opt-out list because I don't trust them enough not to sell my address once they have verified that there is an actual person behind it.
Argh, I hate spam.
Funnyv (well not really), have had pretty much the same message on my mobile phone here in the UK, my mates in sweden got them as well on the swedish network. Wonder if they're the same or if the spammers picked up the idea from those sms messages...
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
I'm just stunned that people actually fall for this stuff.
They notify you by flying pig courier !
This is obviously a plot... who the hell in their right mind would have a crush on me?!?!
People who signed up for free memberships with classmates.com are now getting the message "Who has a message for you" They are then given the option of finding out who "has a message for them" by purchasing a premium membership. The things is why does everyone have a message all the sudden?
SOME GIRL: I know somebody who's got a crush on you
:-D
ME: Oh yeah? Who?
SOME GIRL: Will you pay me if I let you have a guess?
ME: I don't care, I'm rich, there you go. Is it SHE?
SOME GIRL: No. Nice try, though.
[later...]
SOME GIRL: Hey OTHER GIRL, I know somebody who likes you
SHE: Oh yeah? Who?
SOME GIRL: Will you pay me if I let you have a guess?
SHE: There you go. Is it stere0?
(note: I didn't have facial hair in primary school)
SOME GIRL: No.
I overheard them, and this is how SOME GIRL got rich by doing this to the whole school and how I got my first kiss a couple of weeks later.
Trollem mirabilem hanc subnotationis exigiutas non caperet
I spend $15,000 on this engagement ring for nothing?!
I had noticed my edu email recieves no spam, while my hotmail account recieves lots. I used an edu email, (i didnt care about this edu email account) for this purpose, and I used a hotmail account. Now, the crush company sent me a bullshit email and I responded to it from each account.
My hotmail inbox recieves 100 spam a day
My edu inbox has had no spam at all.
My question is, are spammers restricted to sending spam to certain edus? There is no known spam filter in place at that edu, so its a curosity.
Oh yes, if I provided false information to a ISP for their services, I would most certainly get shut down, so why wouldn't they. And the money you make from the spammers from the ISPs isn't worth the cost of keeping them, (angry users and bandwidth)
Slashdot Hypocrisy at work?
Your significant other puts your email address in. You get an email saying "somone likes you". You send it to the trash. Your significant other gets mad at you for not liking them back.
I am so one thousand three hundred and thirty seven!
I wonder if it's fair to link to the print version of the article. For everything we know Salon is not in good financial shape anyway, using the nice no-ads print version service they provide to circumvent the ads seems rather questionable to me. Using the /. effect for something good (funding Salon) wouldn't be so bad, now wouldn't it?
.02 CHF.
While I'm at, how about those people who are sitting at the end of a cable modem and think they need ad-blockers?
Just my
funny, some weeks ago I received a SMS on my mobile with the same content, telling me: Someone who is too shy has a crush on you.
To find out dial: 0190-whatever
0190 is in Germany the dialing prefix for Premium rate-services (from 1 to 10 euros/minute)
I didn't call but looked in the newsgroups if someone has: works exactly the same way you described:
- please give us some mobile numbers from persons you guess that might be it..
Careful.... Replying to one of those messages is an 09*** number. Typically charging about £1 ( ~US$1.30) per minute!
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
"My dog has gotten 'someone has a crush on you' e-mail messages -- she's a cute dog, but no one has a crush on her," says Karen Demars, co-founder of eCrush. "My belief is that they are sending 'someone has a crush on you' messages to people who have not been legitimately crushed."
Yes, but on the Internet
*) No one knows you're a dog (unless dogs can reply?)
*) On the Internet, there are people who have crushes on dogs.
If some lame service requires you to supply them with an e-mail address, use a one-time address.
Read is once for your password. If you start receiving spam you know the originator and can iglore that address.
Spammotel provides in such a service. Also some providers allow you to use alias@your_name.your_isp.com, making it simple to track the origin of spam and making it easyer to filter (loveletter.com@my_name.my_isp.com)
Hotmail serves the purpose of one-time accounts very well. How hard is it to forget about a hotmail account anyway?
Privacy is terrorism.
*hand over 14.95 or they will sell your email...* Hmmm smells like extortion to me folks... Feel free to ship all these emails to ftc.gov and let them deal with these jokers... In the meantime, try spamcop.net and see if they can munge the headers to find out the true source of these jokers..
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
... is not to search public fora for it, but to trick people into giving it.
This scam is one thing. Mitnick telephoning people to tell them there's a problem with their server is another example. E-mail hoaxes (tell all your friends and everyone you care about!!!) is yet another example. It's called social engineering, and isn't new, but new applications are found every day. Education is the only answer.
First law on spamming: Spammers Lie. Which is, in this case, once again true because there is no one at all who has a crush on you. Just some dark-side marketeer who has a crush on your mailaddress so they can start shipping spam. Bah.
(In case you're wondering, the other laws on spammers:
2 - Recursive, If spammer seems to be telling the truth, see Rule 1.
3 - Spammers are stupid.
And ofcourse, the uberrule (rule 0): Spammers are thieves)
I'm sorry, but anyone who falls for this is either young and stupid, or just a plain moron.
How many, "I love you's", "look at my pics", etc. does it take before the suckers of the world wake up??
There really is someone who likes you. In fact, here's the original personal ad involved:
"Mass email marketer ISO young, wealthy singles with low self-esteem and money to burn. Low IQ is a plus, gullibility even better. Turn-ons: making telephone calls at dinnertime, taking long walks on the beach with your money."
What's your damage, Heather?
As much as we hate spam, this one is really good. Get people to give you 20 or so emails from their address list voluntarily. Then spam those 20 to get 20 more. the those 400 to get 20 more then etc etc...
Despite the fact people are getting unsolicited email from a company that they have had no business dealings with (and the fact that that is illegal...) this does seem to be an unique business tactic. Unique but sleazy and underhanded as well.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
that spam and scam are only one letter different...
The stupidity some people must have to belive it though.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Sign up as Arafat and put Bush's email as the crush. Who knows, this just may be what this whole conflict needs. They can even broker some peace deal under the table. :)
Karma: NaN (mostly due to meddling Slashcode programmers)
And they have no morals either. I once got an email saying I received an e-card sent from someone using this service. I went there and they claim to donate a cent to charities everytime someone sends a card through them. - should've realized it was bullshit during these dot.bust days. They asked for my name and email address to retrieve the card, so I typed them in and clicked "Get my Card", to only receive an error page in return. Only then that I realized that I just gave my information to some fucking spammers!
Now I sometimes get junk from them, or from > their other alias in my hotmail account, which - interestingly - gets very little spam otherwise. Maybe because it 10+ chars long. Some of them were from legitimate companies too - some college in the UK even got duped into using their service to advertise itself.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
that cryptic email saying someone has a crush on you may not be what it seems.
That's unfortunate. After all, if you can't trust an anonymous email liberally dosed with spelling errors and exclamation points, who can you trust?
--saint
its the same scam people offer something to get people in the door get their email and sell the address to spammers..
Vote for Death Sentences to Spammers today! Put that political ill gotten lobby moeny to use with your congressman demand Death Penatly for Spammers!
Don't Tread on OpenSource
What do you mean I have to pay $14.90 for a stupid daisy?
...vividly encapsulates that post-Watergate/pre-punk/coked-up moment when you could trust no one, least of all yourself.
I'm shocked! Totally shocked! A spammer who is a dishonest crook? Who could have anticipated such a thing?!
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Funnycard is also just an email harvester! It has the subject:
Message from person_you_know via the FunnyCard Network.
It comes with a forged header, that says it's sent from the person_you_know (of course it was my sister). Clicking on the link then requires you to put in 4 (fake of course) email addresses to see the card. As soon as you submit it, it sends the same email to all 4 addresses with a forged return address of YOU (you get back the send errors that the fake users you sent to, don't exist). Displays some lame joke (that the sender never saw), and says goodbye.
It was then it dawned on me that there was no identification code in the message ! If I dialed this number, how would the service know who I was ? How would it identify me, so that I could listen to my personal message ?
After that realisation, I dumped the message straight in trash, as I have done with the numerous follow ups.
This has been out for a while. I recall getting a few emails to my hotmail account about hmm 1 and a half years ago. When you check the website, it says you had to pay to find out who.
Not new, and not a big deal. If someone really liked you, they could actually tell you, though this is slashdot.
Spam is not worth your time to be read.
Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a revolving door.
...while adding the sentence "know someone who has a crush on you" to my mailfilter.
Just won't happen.
And thanks, too, for linking directly to the "printable" form of the article. One page is better than 3 or 4, and no advertising!
Very cool. (:
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
My numbers come from here.
$100 gets 10 million addresses. It costs $3,000 to send these 10 million messages. Let's assume a capital outlay of $3,100 per week, which seems reasonable.
A "positive response rate" of 0.1% to 1% is expected. Say 0.1%, since this scam is especially egregious, that's 10,000 responses per week, is 10,000 suckers per 60 * 24 * 7 = 10,080 minutes.
That means a sucker is born every minute (every 59.52 seconds, actually), which we already knew.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
A few weeks ago, I got one of these e-mails. The wording of the e-mail made it blatantly obvious that it was spam. They didn't even seem to have a web site. They just told me to phone an 09 number (which, no doubt would have cost a few pounds) to find out the identity of the admirer. It was a UK phone number which makes a change - much of the spam I get seems be in Korean or something.
These would be illegal just 10 minutes ago, this is has far as anyone can go! But it's not has far as anyone can go! Someone has can go 9 minutes and 59 seconds farther! Or they has can go farther in the other direction... "See my last living pictures!I would has be dead just 30 seconds later!"
Yesterday, I received five e-mails from "inlove@lovebox.com" - a spam campaign apparently going since May. The Love Box Company is less than impressed. The text of the e-mail is along the lines of "Someone you know has asked us to send you this e-mail. They think you are: sweet, attractive, charming, exciting. To find out who this person is, call this number: 090xxxxxxxx. (calls charged at 2.5p/sec)
However, I have managed to trace this guy to a limited company, and trace the premium rate number that he asks you to dial. Hopefully, the premium rate number will be shut down, his company can be had for false advertising, and his ISP's account will also be shut down.
Like car accidents, most hardware problems are due to driver error.
If they sent me an e-mail "Someone doesn't hate you," I might fall for that, but I doubt it.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
You should be giving unique email addresses to your friends...
Get a domain, with catch-all email. If you mail to joe, send it with a return address of joe@myemaildomain.com. If you fill out a web form at sears, mark your address as sears@myemaildomain.com. My personal favourite is to mark the email address on my WHOIS form as dontspam@myemaildomain.com. When I go after a spammer, I can refer to that email address, and say that it only exists on my WHOIS form, and that they must be scooping emails from the WHOIS database. Poetic justice.
I got one and was dumb enough to put in a few emails and then realized it had to be a system where they just then collect those addresses and spam them.
I thought it was both ultra-sleazy, and also a bit clever.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
I got an email from someonelikesyou.com some time ago. Since I own my own domain, I made up a number of ficticious email addresses. Suprise, suprise! Those email addresses shortly started receiving a lot of spam, as well as continued "some one likes you" messages even after I followed their procedures for removing the addresses.
I'm 21 years old and I remember either junior or senior year in high school getting an email almost exactly like this. directed me to www.crushlink.com This one though it would give you HINTS as to who the crush was, but the catch was you had to put in email address of "could-be" crushes. So if anybody out there has a first name begining with A and ending with A and a last name with LESS than 8 letters, uh, IM YOUR CRUSH.
I was getting some spam from crushlink and it said a crush had entered my email address and I had to list all my crushes to see if it was one of them. Being the cynical one that I am, there was no way I was going to even verify my own email address, let alone give them more without verifying crushlink first! Well found it's in the same /24 as someonelikes you which I later got email from and it's owned by a 'direct' marketing company Jumpstart Technologies http://www.jtllc.com/. (Yep just as the artile says)
Jeremy
Melbourne, Australia
Jabber Australia
Leave it to nerds to be the only ones falling for the "Somebody has a crush on you gag." Yeah right, as if anybody thinks they need to secretly admire your bolonga tits, when they know all they have to do is walk up and say, "If you eat me, you can treat me to dinner."
Oh CowboyNeal, why haven't I heard back from you? ...damn insensitive clod...
They do...at least Crushlink does. I got one and immediately dumped email address of co-workers who I knew were probably trying to repay me for a prank I had played. Sure enough...it appears we were meant for each other!
"Herbivores eat well cause their food never, ever runs."
If you think about it, the is a great business model (in some eyes). They send out emails to people who have crushes and it sends them to a website where they have to sign up for things to learn who it is. Since crushes are secret and be for jokes even, they can randonly send it to arbitrary people to get them to sign up for things even if there is no real crush because nobody knows there is no person on the other end. Bam, spam but with a seemingly legit premise. I get emails all the time but I'm a nerd so I know it isn't legit :)
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
Noone really has a crush on the support alias for my company? I don't know how I'm going to break the news to it.
This is a similar marketing campaign as MCI had several years ago called "Friends and Family". You would give them the phone number of someone you call frequently and if they change their phone service to MCI, you get a better rate on phone calls to them. It's just a massive pyramid scheme.
But why is the rum gone?
I received an email along these lines from sendacrush.com only a couple of weeks ago, on one of my spam-only hotmail accounts that I've never given out to a human being.
:)
I sent a complaint to an address I found on the site, but quite predictably got no response. The sending of unsolicited email is illegal; all we have to do is prove they've been doing this beyond reasonable doubt. I think a class-action full of slashdotters who quite evidently nobody has a crush on will more than fulfil that requirement. Who's up for it?
- SMJ - (It's not just a name: it's a bad aftertaste.)
because Miss Cleo told me not to answer these things. She's saved me a lot of money, let me tell you!
Ad luna, Alicia! Ad luna!
A couple of weeks ago I received a SMS message that started with "Iemand vindt je leuk, en heeft ons jouw nummer achtergelaten..." ("Someone likes you and has left your number with us", original Dutch maintained for Google searches).
Oh, speaking of googling, there was a hilarious spelling mistake at the end "Wil je weten wie je geheime *aanbieder* is?" ("Do you want to know who your secret admirer is", except they put an 'e' in "aanbidder" where a 'd' should be, "aanbieder" means "provider")
I couldn't find a reference on the internet to this operation, so I figured it might be legit. I called to the number they gave: 09062001372 (couple dozen eurocents a minute). They pulled the same routine as described above. I had to enter my own phone number (as if they didn't have it) then take a guess as to who left my number in the first place (I gave a bogus number). Then I was promised they'd SMS the number of my secret provider, but of course they never did.
I suppose this scam pays off quite well. I'm a pretty suspicious person as a rule, but in this case, especially after I couldn't find any information about it on the internet, I just had to check it out. They got about 3 minutes worth of high phone rates out of me.
"temerity," who the fuck uses the word temerity? It doesn't even fit. Temerity, geez us, take the thesaurus off your desktop now.
Actually, in Sweden, it could be fraud to fool anyone to call a premium-rate service witouth notifying the caller (callee?) about the cost. Unfortunately, the swedish allmänna reklamationsnämnden (Better Business Bureau) don't accept claims on less than 300 SEK (~30).
Well, if it's addresses they want, why not give them some addresses to play with...
This could be "educational"...
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
This is pathetic.
Go to the beach, folks, 'cause there ain't gonna be any real news till after Labor Day.
Is that you???
Trollem mirabilem hanc subnotationis exigiutas non caperet
I got these stupid e-mails too, but they wouldn't release the address of your so-called crush until you furnish them with e-mail address after e-mail address.
Instead of putting down bogus addresses, I submitted every abuse@{$insert ISP here} address and anti-spam address that I could think of. That'll give them something to think about.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
It would appear that Jumpstart Technology (http://www.jtllc.com/) has changed their website so that it no longer says 'Direct Marketing'! Must have been causing them some greif.
Jeremy
Melbourne, Australia
Jabber Australia
This is news?! What idiot gets an email from a complete stranger to go to a website that has a bunch of ads and enter email addresses of people they know that they think might be the one who had a crush on them? Does it actually take anyone more than three tenths of a second to realize it's an email harvesting scam?!
I mean.. jesus christ... come on people.... This is as bad as when slashdot posted an article about an anti-spam service you could register your email address with -- only to find out that the service used all of those addresses to build spam lists.
Spammers lie and cheat!!!!
Imagine that!
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
adultfriendfinder.com and any of a dozen other 'dating' websites. It's pretty obvious after the first one where they point you directly to the site...! I rate these on par with those "Wasn't last night great?" emails... particularly funny if my wife and I have just come back from a weekend together.
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
I entered a-z@mydomain.com into eCrush. These e-mail addresses appeared nowhere else. Slowly, but surely over the next year, each address received an e-mail saying someone had a crush on them...
I knew it wasn't true though.
<sigh>
"Why should we leave America to go to America Junior?" - H. Simpson, on visiting Canada
no one really has a crush on my ferret? I guess that's good, though. She's not really one for long walks on the beach or snuggling while watching movies.
This one really bugs me. I've been dealing with these bastards' emails for what feels like forever. Every time I go to pine and hit that favorite key combo, M-S-R-F-A, I get more incensed. These companies prey on my friends' insecurities, then usurp *my* time and resources, all so they can build an addition to their garish Malibu beach houses.
I want revenge. I want to make them pay. I want to find a hole in their system that allows me to exploit *their* resources. Why not write a bot that logs on to their website and enters believable, false email addresses, making their spam lists worthless and chewing up their processor time? There must be a legal way to exact at least an ounce of flesh from these manipulative, bottom-feeding insults to civilized human beings, and I want to hear suggestions.
.. a crush on me. Turns out she was only after me for my p4 processor.
Alice is a tease!
Live web cams
Think of someone gathering headers from mail servers over a period of time: Marketers, corporate IT depts, law enforcement, whatever else.
They could learn a lot about you and your contacts without much effort: It's completely automated; no human interaction required.
Is there any rule against it? You're not opening the e-mails.
What would you do with the info? I can't think what marketers would do -- maybe target people who have more friends. A business might benefit from a study of how communication and info really flows in their company. For law enforcement, the info could be invaluable in trying to put together a picture of a criminal organization. And don't forget the true innovators, virus writers!
I have officially blocked any e-mails coming from crushlink or their servers into my servers because they are basically spam. This happened after two incidents. One day I received 25 e-mails all saying someone had a crush on me... I was a little suspicious, considering I had a girlfriend at the time and none of the e-mails matched with hers.
:-P Obviously, crushlink was just a spammer. So I blocked them as such. Luckily all of their e-mails usually have valid headers (saying they are from an @crushlink.com address). Just in case though, I also went to the effort of blocking the entire range of servers owned by crushlink.
Another day I received almost 50 e-mails (I have multiple addresses) including one at an address I haven't used since 1995. And yet, amazingly I am still single..
~ kjrose
It's better than divorce - you get to keep the house.
sulli
RTFJ.
I know at least one of these places requires you to list 5-10 emails of people you have a "crush" on in order to figure out who has a crush on you.
I am not going to do the math, but unless everyone really has 5+ crushes, the value of these things is low. Why would they demand so many addresses if they were not trying to collect addys? I dare say that if they were truely concerned with quality crush-informs, they would not create exponential dilution in their scheme.
big poopys!
Maybe they're smart enough to cull these out of their database, but unless that's so, the site doesn't seem to be used for massive email harvesting.
Never sign up anywhere with a real email address. /dev/null, and you never hear about them again.
Instead, get an account on Spamgourmet, and you'll have as many disposable email addresses as necessary, that will work only as many times as you want. Then they become a direct link to
Seriously. This service rocks.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
Got about 5 or 6 of these sms...and i never called back. Then the other day i got a message reading:
"Hi, surprise! Youll never guess who i am..."
- the call came from a number in denmark and i didnt call back first.
Then i remembered that i actually KNOW someone in denmark and i smsed back. It was her!
Boy, i nearly missed to meet an old friend again just because i get spammed all the time...thats sad.
cu,
Lispy
After reading the article, several questions arise - what the hell is mitre.org up to and what culpability do they share in propagating this spam? Did Tseng and Schleier-Smith conduct any of their dot-com building on the federal dime? If so, can they be sued for recovery of wasted tax dollars?
The main worry here is Mitre. If they are involved in government research, what are these guys up to? Is our government playing games with spam or is there some real, nefarious purpose here?
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
I once set up about 10 or so dummy passport accounts (don't ask why - long story) .. anyway, none of these were ever used, and never handed out to anyone.
Then one day crushlink emails me to 5 of these dummy accounts telling each of them that someone has a crush on me! The only way the addresses could have been aquired would be by trawling through the microsoft site looking for addresses.
I also note with interest a link in the salon article to http://www.rhythm.cx/crushlink/ - some guy who set up an email address just to try and catch crushlink out, and got an email from 'jennyslist.com'. So that is where jennyslist got those email addresses of mine..
I'm shocked to learn that some of my spam may turn out to be fraudulent. What's next? Is Slashdot/Salon going to have a story about Work At Home opportunities and penis enlargers?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I didn't realise that 03 had already been designated as geographic. I thought it was just reserved. Good to see a comprehensive list anyway - I remember seeing a very old version of this list once back when phone numbers were simple.
Interestingly, I notice that there aren't any Birmingham 0121 8xx or 0121 9xx numbers, so I wonder how long it'll be before Birmingham numbers migrate to 0121 8xxx yyyy and so that can be renumbered 024 8xxx yyyy. That'd be good.
I found another page that looks pretty interesting too.
Can someone please file a class action lawsuit?
Some FTC law must have been violated.
I'm just really shy...
Salon is running an article about how that cryptic e-mail saying you can enlarge your penis in 10 days may not be what it seems. Portrayed as services to increase length and girth, some voice concerns that some such sites -- most with falsified WHOIS records -- are preying on people's insecuritites to build spam lists. One site in particular, penis-enlargement-guaranteed.com, has the temerity to assume that your penis is small and unsatisfying.
Well, I'm certainly glad Slashdot was so gracious as to inform me that this particular spam was not legitimate. Thanks, guys!
And its not like you can even trust the answer it gives! If I enter the email address of somebody I know, but don't like, for curiosities sake, they will recieve an email saying 'somebody likes you'. If they guess my email, it will say that I like them, which is not the case.
I almost worked for one of these companies, but I remembered that I have a concience.
How do these companies manage not to get blacklisted by lots of mailservers?
"See my vest see my vest, made from real gorilla chest"
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
I kind of hate to say this since I like Rackspace, but no one else seems to have mentioned it..
Here's my story (all of this transpired on June 19, 2002)..
I knew very quickly that this thing is sending bot-forged unsolicited emails.. I'm the webmaster for a friend's domain in Germany--let's say "somedomain.de." I setup the webmaster address to point to my email at Yahoo!. I setup one more alias to point to her email address on her webmail (I think on Web.de). I received an email at my Yahoo! account, sent to "figlio@somedomain.de." Guess what? That's not one of the two accounts that have ever existed for somedomain.de. Where the heck could the "figlio" have come from!? Is it a handle that someone has in another European country and the Someonelikesyou.com PHP bot took that and applied to a random domain? I think so...
So, I did a whois on Someonelikesyou.com's IP and the IP block was owned by Rackspace. I emailed abuse@rackspace.com. The next day, there was some sort of "We're down for maintenance--sorry for any inconvenience" message. I guess they finally found a shameless host with Jumpstart--or maybe they'll be somewhere else next week.
Guess what... you've got a secret admirer!
Want to find out who it is? Come visit...
http://www.CrushLink.com
Email address:
Invitation code:
Make sure you enter in this information
exactly as shown above.
See you soon!
Sincerely,
The Crush Master
---
PS. This is not junk email. You've received it
because someone *you know* came to CrushLink and
confessed an interest in you! Maybe it was that
hottie from English class or the cute one at the
party last weekend or maybe--well, we can't even
give you a hint until you come to CrushLink.com.
PPS. If you do not wish to receive any more of
these messages from CrushLink, please visit
http://www.CrushLink.com/block.php3
Verio Wins Spam King Award for favoring their paying customers (read as SPAMMERS) over the thousands of innocent victims. Have a look at http://www.machineroom.org to see it.
As recently as 15 years ago, my phone number was 205 and the whole phone number was only 8 digits long including the leading 0.
Okay, this was about 1990 for me. The whole number was 9 digits, we had to dial '9' to get out to the local STD code, which meant we had wierd-ass numbers depending on where you are calling from. The phone box was 211.
In some parts of Somerset, there are still 5-digit numbers I think.
I don't know if it's been mentioned above, but crushlink and someonelikesyou are both on the same IP block with apparently the same owners.
.COM FUCK YOU AND YOUR HARVEST SITE .COM FUCK YOU AND YOUR HARVEST SITE
I hate them so much i put lines like this in my sendmail access file:
65.19.140.27 550 SOMEONE HATES YOU
65.19.140.29 550 SOMEONE HATES YOU
I also really hate Traffic Magnet, but thats another story all together.
http://youare.whyihate.com
Too bad to see that he's still scamming -- he was very smooth, and I hoped he'd graduate and go into something more innocuous, like pimping.
According to the article the 2 guys who run this work at Mitre. I wonder how Mitre would feel knowing 2 of it's nanotechnology staff were engaged in fraud.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I just got one of those messages yesterday. I got spooked because I've got a girl, and it smelled like spam. The privacy policy read like, "You will get spammed". I've done the unsubscribe thing and I'm going to keep track of any spam I get in the future for leagal reasons. My account doesn't get spam, so if I do, I'll know where it's comming from...
Mod me up and I'll give you a hint!
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
If so, let him know -- I was pretty surprised when someone had a crush on junk@rpgexchange.com, a dummy address I have never used or published ever :)
:)
"Disclosure to Third Parties
We may occasionally, for entertainment purposes, disclose non-personally identifiable information to registered Crushlink users about other users.
We do not share our mailing list with any other company, person or entity."
For your entertainment purposes, the CrushLink founder Greg Tseng's contact emails at Stanford (physics dept.) and his Harvard alum email:
gytseng@stanford.edu
gtseng@post.harvard.edu
Show him you have a crush on him too by offering him things like "Free Inkjet Printer Cartridges", the "Lowest Mortgage Rates Around", how to make "$204,000 in 2 months", and hell how to "Increase Your Energy and Sex Drive!"
-fren
"Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?"
1) NEVER RESPOND TO SPAM Oh sure, they say they'll take your name off the list, but they're lying. What they really want to do is confirm that they've got a live address. Also, if you respond, they'll sell your address to every other spammer on the planet meaning you'll soon be flooded with even more spam. 2) DON'T POST YOUR ADDRESS ON YOUR WEBSITE It seems like a good idea at the time, but posting your email address on your personal home page is just an invitation to spammers. Spammers and the people who sell spamming as a business have software that "harvests" email addresses from the Net. This software crawls through the Internet seeking text strings that are -something-@-something-.-something-. When it finds one, it catalogs it on a database of other email addresses to be used to send spam. 3) USE A SECOND EMAIL ADDRESS IN NEWSGROUPS Newsgroups are the great email address gathering ground for spammers. If you post to a group, you're going to get spam -- it is just a matter of time. So how are you supposed to participate? Use a different email address than the one you use for talking to friends and relatives. In other words, have a public address and a private address. You'll just have to deal with the spam in your public account. 4) DON'T GIVE YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS WITHOUT KNOWING HOW IT WILL BE USED If a website is asking for your email address, they want to use it for something. Be sure you know what. Read the terms of use and privacy statements of any site before telling them your address. Ask yourself some simple questions. Are they going to share or sell my address? Do I want emails from this website? Do I trust them? Is it worth the risk? If you can't answer these questions satisfactorily, if you can't find their privacy statement, don't tell them your address. 5) USE A SPAM FILTER While there is no such thing as a perfect filter, anti-spam software can help keep spam at manageable level. Some of it is cumbersome, some works better than others, some even requires that you let your email messages go through another system for storage and cleaning. But right now, that's the way it works. 6) NEVER BUY ANYTHING ADVERTISED IN SPAM The reason that people spam is because they can make money. They make money, like all advertisers, by convincing people to buy a product. If no one buys the things advertised in spam, companies will quit paying spammers to advertise their products. Even if you do all of these things, you could still get spam. Just remember to send your spam to the Spam Recycling Center so that we can forward them to the Federal Trade Commission and to the spam filter developers so that they can continue to try to stop the spam before it gets to you.
look my sig changes!!! nrrt mf oci jdabi.o!!! z..a ir kot gh-ntbk{{{
Normally, I would have assumed it was a scam. My friends aren't the type to do cutesy things like that. But on the other hand, the spam arrived on my birthday! So I figured, "No, it has to be legit, a message from one of my friends. I don't get much spam; what are the chances a spam of this particular kind would arrive exactly on my birthday?"
When I went to the site, they wanted a name, so I put in a fake name, and then they wanted more info, and I figured, "The hell with this, whoever sent me a birthday message, too bad for them. I'm not giving this place more info." But by that point I had already confirmed my email by entering my name, since I was so certain it was legit due to the birthday timing.
It's nice to know my initial instincts were correct, and that I didn't miss some nice birthday message from a friend. But their scam did manage to harvest my address due to perfectly coincidental timing on their part.
ChicagoFan
http://www.mitre.org/research/nanotech/pictures/ts eng.gif
:)
looks like he needs all the help he can get
-fren
"Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?"
I've been onto their particular game for about half a year now, as evidenced in a warning I wrote here.
In general, you should never give anyone's email address out. Ie, treat it like a phone number; it's not yours to give out, it's the owner's.
I treat the 'send this to a friend' thing in the same way. If you read the privacy statements of a lot of web sites, you'll see that it refers to your privacy, but doesn't mention anything about the privacy of your friends' email addresses that you happen to type into those 'send this to a friend' boxes.
Have you heard about that Richard Stallman guy...? He's working on a full-featured text editor for Unix! We won't have to use ed anymore!
Just create a bunch of email addresses whose sole purpose is to catch SPAM to feed your own blacklist. Its great cause you don't need to worry about finding SPAM, it is automatically sent to you.
Something I started doing recently was replying to spam with a message that contained web bugs. The web bugs were links to Linux ISO images. If only a couple of those spammers clicked the OK button (or if their MUA didn't ask and just downloaded) their BW would be wasted for hours. :)
You guys are fucking bastards, deep-linking to the printable version of the page so Salon loses ad revenue. /. has no consideration
I got an email yesterday saying someone had a crush on me, but it wasn't like this one (although I have seen this one asking for emails a year ago). The one I got yesterday wanted me to phone them to find out who it was - maybe it is similar but they are trying to get your phone numbers instead... or maybe they just plan on making money on the call which costs 2.5p a second! (thats about 1.5 cents a second)
...is in bed with RackSpace?
I got "bit" by SomeoneLikesYou repeatedly. Someone (who I don't even know) sent someone a legitimate crush, and they guessed a friend's address, who guessed me and all my friends... In my idiocy, I put in a list of addresses. They all got mail. I figured it out, and had a friend with his own domain setup some test accounts. I "guessed" their addresses, and, sure enough, they got mail right away.
I quickly sent mail to RackSpace, informing them that it was sending 'fraudulent' mail, and that I was 95% sure that it was being used for nothing other than address harvesting. I also mentioned the clearly-falsified headers. All I ever received was an automated reply. And... The site is still up.
Other people have said before that RackSpace knowingly harbors a bunch of spammers. I really would have no regrets blocking the entirety of RackSpace's netblocks.
This is surprisingly brilliant for a spammer, but that only makes me more angry. However, I created an account with them, and checked "Do not send me mail" option -- and have not received mail from them since. (In addition, the account they have gets NO spam.) So, while it's likely that they're making a huge database of spam addresses, I haven't gotten spammed yet (or else my hosting company has some REALLY good spam filters that I don't about), and they even seem to take removal requests.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
"My dog has gotten 'someone has a crush on you' e-mail messages -- she's a cute dog, but no one has a crush on her," says Karen Demars, co-founder of eCrush.
Why the hell does her dog have an email address? Why do I suspect that Karen Demars is exaggerating a little bit?
I was sent one of these things from sendacrush.com at some point,.. exactly like this, the mail subject says "someone you know has a crush on you" however, when you open the e-mail the little print in there says "someone you know thought you had a crush on them" but most people dont see that part and they just fly over to the site, and it takes you directly to a page that says "enter the e-mail address of the person you think has a crush on you" so people start pumping in their friends addresses, and before you know it, all those people are getting the same e-mail you just got. I didnt see anyplace in the site to "pay" for your answer, probably because there is no answer since it was sneaky BS to begin with. I got one of these things, saw the game they were playing and immediately sent them a vulgar nasty e-mail demanding I be removed and also not get another one, even if somoene enters my address, or Id take legal action..... I havent goten one since. ..sigh.. the net certainly isnt what it used to be.
I have a crush on gytseng@stanford.edu and jssmith@stanford.edu, don't you?
I was wary of these emails I was getting so I set up some sneakemail accounts and voila, I got all kinds of spam.
Back in school, one evening, for entertainment, a few of us made a directed relationship graph of the people in our student house (about 60 or 70 people). An arrow from X to Y meant that X was interested in Y in more than a just friendly way.
We then made a copy, with the vertices of the graph unlabeled, and posted it on the house bulletin board, as a puzzle.
People did a lot better than I would have expected at finding their vertice on the unlabeled graph.
Yea...yea...make all the jokes about me not having to worry about anyone having a crush on me. This technique will spin off (if it already hasn't) in countless other BS "services" that will try to trick people into giving out their friends emails. Just a couple of weeks ago my boss sent our whole lab a link from this website that sends practical joke emails to your "friends"... http://cgi.slygreetings.com/page.pl?page=0&aut h=
- you have a job that requires that you post on public, technical mailing lists.
- you have a job where your email address ends up in whois records.
- you're the postmaster, hostmaster or any other sort of contact for a company.
- you don't need your email address to be publicly available for business reasons.
- somebody forwards an email that you sent them to a public mailing list.
- you've had the same, well-known email address since the days when it was considered a good thing to publicize your address.
- one of your friends or business associates gets a virus that causes your email address to end up getting sent off to a mailing list or something.
- your dipshit ISP allows VRFY.
- etc, etc, etc.
There's not always an easy way to keep from getting spam, even if you're relatively careful with your addresses.from the debiah-project list, 2001
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
People's nember one insecurities, is there nothing lower? Oh I forgot spam! Perhaps the problem is that so many people to dupe and so many loopholes. Sharing of adresses for entertainment purposes, yeah their entertainment no doubt topurchase dates. but i digress, anyway while i do not advocate cyberterrorism, i think that perhaps they founders need to have many crushes on them? It is by those full email boxes that they might actually get a clue.
-For it is the very essence of imperialism to turn information systems into wild, bloodthirsty animals-
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2001/deb
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
We get a few of these a month actually sent to root@speakeasy.net. Hmm, does anyone think this is a real person -- I sort of doubt it. Although we always look suspiciously at the other members of the engineering group that gets root@ mail whenever we get these, its more for our own entertainment.
"My dog has gotten 'someone has a crush on you' e-mail messages -- she's a cute dog, but no one has a crush on her," ... and you have an e-mail address for your dog because.....
Damn them, I thought it was real, because i had'nt recieved any other spam on that account, plus, one of the people that i liked had that email address.
The "SomeoneLikesYou" site sends out ads that "someone likes you" to whoever you guess..
pope@vatican.va and postmaster@goatse.cx are going to be surprised.....
Good luck to you. You have probably already checked, but dice.com is an excellent free service.
I had a bit of spam today alleging that someone fancied me, and inviting me to phone a premium rate number to find out who it was. Thing is, it didn't actually *say* that it was a premium rate number. In the UK, the regulator (ICSTIS) requires that the charges for the call are attached to all advertising for these services. I've dropped a little e-mail to ICSTIS regarding this. Hopefully it'll turn into a very nice LART for this spammer.
--
Windows XP. From the people who brought you Edlin.
lets post some mail-adress here sales@the-emailcenter.com
Thus must be how winners of the Darwin Award meet up.
Table-ized A.I.
I saw a similar one to this at Valentine's. Right away I saw it was probably a spam-generator, so I created an bogus account on my mail server and gave them that address. Within two weeks I was receiving 150 spams/day.
If you are an administrator, WARN YOUR USERS before you're innundated with spam!
Got the same scam via SMS in switzerland too.
Almost called, I thought it might be my GF.
ive known about that thing for almost a year now..... (and so has everyone in my address book :( )
but since they don't tell you they are going to send mail to each of the names you enter isn't there some privacy act or at least something against that?
-frost
It was from the other girl, Caroline. We were both nine; she had brown hair that went down to her neck, good grades in class, brown eyes and a gorgeous smile. We started "going out together" (read: spending time together holding hands and being too embarassed to say anything) after I sent her a love letter I had written on thick, orange paper. I think I still have the reply she sent me somewhere.
Anyway, we started spending time together, and one day we went up to her bedroom. We were both standing in a corner; she convinced me that I should go first. We closed our eyes and I gave her a peck on the cheek, then a rash kiss on her mouth. I didn't know what to say for a couple of minutes, and neither did she.
Well, that's it. I haven't seen her for a couple of years but I still remember how we both felt. What about you?
P.S.: This will probably get moderated down, but thinking about it made me feel great. Thanks! :-D
Trollem mirabilem hanc subnotationis exigiutas non caperet
Why doesn't someone set up a simmilar scam, only insted of harvesting emails after n have been entered, it would display a little warning about such scams, and then send the user to an internet privacy site. If you DO take the emails, and send the same message to them, you could (on the warning screen after THEY entered emails) show who the spam was really from. Kind of a warning to not trust them with your email again.
The opinions in this post are ficticious. Any similarity to actual opinions, real or imagined, is purely coincidental.
The premise is simple: Show them the "love" that they've shown us. Crushlink the hell out of the founders. Here are some starting points to tracking them down.
...and remember, all this information was freely available off the net with little effort in searching. Also, I'm not encouraging anyone to spam these people, or do "bad things"... I just want J-boy and the Gregster to feel the love they've shown towards us. Boy they're hot... I think I'm getting a crush!
Crushlink/SomeoneLikesYou founders:
Johann Schleier-Smith, with a current student email address of jssmith@standford.edu A quick Yahoo! search also turned up jschleie@piper28.tjhsst.edu (his high school account), johann@dc.net, and nkjr68a@prodigy.com.
Greg Tseng, a more common name, but the krazeeazndude@yahoo.com, greg3586@yahoo.com, and flopur@yahoo.com all show a location of Fremont, CA. According to the story and everything else I've found, this punk is still at Stanford with his butt buddy Johann, so I'd say those stand a good chance of being recently made accounts. Definitely not his primary, but still recent.
Phone numbers while at Harvard were (617)493-6344 (Greg) and 493-3313 (Johann). Not that hard to find their current numbers, either, for those who are into that sort of thing. They both attended Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexadria, VA. They look like they were definitely teacher's pets. htt://www.tjhsst.edu/contact.html gives you plenty of guesses the next time someone crushes you. I mean, we love their teachers as much as they did, right?
Then again, that's probably not a good idea. How about this one: develop a "crush" on their current mentors. Wonder if that would do anything to their grades? Gotta find a way to clue the faculty in as to who runs crushlink, or it's no good. hmmm. I think I'm getting a warm fuzzy for Professor W.E. Moerner wmoerner@standford.edu.
BTW, Johann has a sister named Monika who also went to Harvard. Could probably dig more up on her, too.
Spread the love!
I suspected this sometime ago.
After collecting various "hints" they gave
(such as n letter from you mail address,
i vowels, same domain as you) I was able to
run these rules against a list of all the
local users. None could pass more than half
the rules.
Exactly 8 months 12 days ago I got an email from Crushlink and thought I'd check it out. I spent some time to make a list of 4 girls I liked and voila! I matched with a girl that I liked but I never knew she liked me! So we started going to the day after and that's why I know the email was 8 months 12 days ago, because we've now been dating 8 months 11 days! I was so happy I even wrote into their "stories" email address but never received a reply. Are my girlfriend and I the *only* successful users of this site? Also, I haven't received any spam from Crushlink or other sites so I thought this was totally legitimate (after all, it was responsible for my new girlfriend), so I was kind of shocked to see the article and all the comments. Do we know for sure that they spam or are people just frustrated that they can't figure out who likes them? (like a couple of my friends :)
If the rest of us like a girl, we generally ask her out. Fucking pussy.
Just wait until someone figures out that they can take these email addresses, change the random word at the beginning, and they're suddenly valid again.
Give me just one of your addresses and I can spam you forever.
finenessflurriedfeature
thats this would be against racespace's AUP ... but the trickets i opened with them didnt go anywhere. This 'service' is really nasty with the amount of email addresses is must produce.
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad