Some Spammer Has a Crush on You

ewhac writes "Salon is running an article about how that cryptic email saying someone has a crush on you may not be what it seems. Portrayed as services to foster romance, some voice concern that some such sites -- two with falsified WHOIS records -- are preying on people's insecurities to build spam lists and directed relationship graphs (who knows who). One site in particular, SomeoneLikesYou, has the temerity to demand you subscribe to an affiliate marketing program or cough up $14.90 before it will hand over the email address of your alleged crush.

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.)"

Comments

Old news... to me, anyway

[Chmarr]

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.

Just don't give away your email address

[mosch]

Not giving your email address works works really well, unless:

• 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.