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.)"
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..
Don't think so. I had one of these, and couldn't find out who it was until I suspected they were just harvesting email addys.
Just for fun, I sent a "crush" to a different email account of mine, and it wouldn't let me "guess" the correct address.
Spammers!
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.
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!
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 $3,100 per week, which seems reasonable.
A "positive response rate" of 0.1% to 1% is expected. Say 0.1%, since this scam is especially egregious, that's 10,000 responses per week, is 10,000 suckers per 60 * 24 * 7 = 10,080 minutes.
That means a sucker is born every minute (every 59.52 seconds, actually), which we already knew.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Yesterday, I received five e-mails from "inlove@lovebox.com" - a spam campaign apparently going since May. The Love Box Company is less than impressed. The text of the e-mail is along the lines of "Someone you know has asked us to send you this e-mail. They think you are: sweet, attractive, charming, exciting. To find out who this person is, call this number: 090xxxxxxxx. (calls charged at 2.5p/sec)
However, I have managed to trace this guy to a limited company, and trace the premium rate number that he asks you to dial. Hopefully, the premium rate number will be shut down, his company can be had for false advertising, and his ISP's account will also be shut down.
Like car accidents, most hardware problems are due to driver error.
Well, if it's addresses they want, why not give them some addresses to play with...
This could be "educational"...
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
No, at my edu we still get alot of spam every day. The school has some spam-filter installed, but its not very good. Although 90% of the spam on that account is from the edu itself. Why they allow all prof's and facuilty to send mail to everyone@wishiwasabetter.edu i'll never know... there own fault though, they put us on an IMAP server with no hard mailbox limit.... heheh...
I got these stupid e-mails too, but they wouldn't release the address of your so-called crush until you furnish them with e-mail address after e-mail address.
Instead of putting down bogus addresses, I submitted every abuse@{$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?
EDU domains tend to scare spammers.. not only is there not much money to be got. They are likely to end up with some anti spam vigalante with a lot of free time that can be spent causing them pain.
So when my address was spammed by SomeoneLikesYou, I got on the phone. Sure enough, the one person who actually did it was my not-so-security-minded girlfriend.
So when I hit the site, I entered only one email address--hers. The site didn't like that, and since it doesn't like bounces either, I just started registering aliases on my linux box. So we had a@mybox.net, b@mybox.net, c@mybox.net, and d@mybox.net.
And, sure enough, when it finally accepted that, it said I had a match! (I also had some 4 more emails popping up in my inbox....)
Since the site demanded that I pay up-front or sign up for affiliate info, I went on my merry way, happy to know I hadn't offended anyone else.
About a month later, though, I got this email "Are you sure this loser Sara is right for you?" which told me to come back and visit the site again, threatening to remove my information and promising not to spam me again. I received a second mesage, again titled "Are you sure this loser Sara is right for you?", before I created a new procmail rule.
I figured I was lucky, I got everything I wanted to know without it costing me anything but the time. I doubt many others were so lucky.