Some Spammer Has a Crush on You 283
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.)"
You gotta be a sucker (Score:2, Insightful)
How many, "I love you's", "look at my pics", etc. does it take before the suckers of the world wake up??
Re:Just reward... (Score:2, Insightful)
Face it, people are stupid, and the internet is the place where they all meet.
Only on Slashnerd (Score:2, Insightful)
Old news... to me, anyway (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:in Germany they do this on mobile phones (Score:1, Insightful)
Just don't give away your email address (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You gotta be a sucker (Score:2, Insightful)
or just plain lonely.
There are a lot of extremely lonely people around who figure "what have I got to lose; it's worth a try" and there you go.
You don't have to be stupid to be lonely.