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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.)"
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 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.
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
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..
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?
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 $3,100 per week, which seems reasonable.
A "positive response rate" of 0.1% to 1% is expected. Say 0.1%, since this scam is especially egregious, that's 10,000 responses per week, is 10,000 suckers per 60 * 24 * 7 = 10,080 minutes.
That means a sucker is born every minute (every 59.52 seconds, actually), which we already knew.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
You can't do that for this service. Your *friends* give them your email address. I'd like to find out which of my "friends" gave my personal email address to crushlink.com (a similar service) and beat them. However it looks like the only way I can find out is by entering the email addresses of all my friends so they all get spammed.
Noone really has a crush on the support alias for my company? I don't know how I'm going to break the news to it.
these guys sent "someone has a crush on you!" messages to thousands of MIT students. talk about blowing your cover. :)
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
I got these stupid e-mails too, but they wouldn't release the address of your so-called crush until you furnish them with e-mail address after e-mail address.
Instead of putting down bogus addresses, I submitted every abuse@{$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?
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.
- 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.