Mariane Posted May 28, 2006 Share Posted May 28, 2006 I received an email from someone I know, asking me to help him get a free iPod (worth 230 US dollars). A company http: //www. ge tit free. net has come up with a (new to me) idea. Could be called "Chain spam", I suppose: Promise people to give them free stuff if they register and get 5 of their friends to register for them. To register you must fill in a form and a survey. They collect lists of valid email adresses, along with all the data of the survey. I've had a good look on the web, needless to say I didn't come across any happy people who had received free stuff from getitfree. This is a particularly vicious form of spam, because the sender is actually someone you really know. And it can't be reported here, because the person who sends this is just ignorant and naive. Mariane Moderator Edit: URL broken to prevent search engine score boosting ... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wazoo Posted May 28, 2006 Share Posted May 28, 2006 whois -h whois.aitdomains.com get it free. net ... Record Created on... 2004-10-15 19:30:45.238 Expire on................ 2006-10-15 06:05:27.452 Been around for a long, long time .. products change every now and then ... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Farelf Posted May 28, 2006 Share Posted May 28, 2006 ... Promise people to give them free stuff if they register and get 5 of their friends to register for them. To register you must fill in a form and a survey. ... Truly a revolting turn of events but driving off an old, tried and true, marketing approach - my own ISP is using something similar (they've overestimated new subscriptions, need to pick them up) and a top level sporting association I belong to has done it for years (high membership numbers = more political clout). Those are "legitimate" cases but evidently spammers use all the tricks too. And it's not all "progress" - there seems to be a resurgance of snail mail "419-type" advance fee scams - Spanish lottery is the one I am seeing, which is how it all started, a hundred years and more ago. Incidentally, at 0.78 Euros a time for postage on those things it is clear that the notion of introducing "pay per message" to stop spam email is not supported by the evidence. Less but "better quality" spam, maybe. Can't say I would be particularly looking forward to that but then my former 200-300 spam per week has recently dropped to a "handful" or less (even getting the occasional spam-free day). For which result I have, unfortunately, done nothing in particular - I'm thinking ISP filtering "on my behalf". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Miss Betsy Posted May 28, 2006 Share Posted May 28, 2006 Incidentally, at 0.78 Euros a time for postage on those things it is clear that the notion of introducing "pay per message" to stop spam email is not supported by the evidence. Less but "better quality" spam, maybe. Not 'better quality' - just the ones that make enough money for the spammer/scammer to pay for the postage. I think someone told me that the reason that 419 scams make it through the filters is because they are each done individually (thus not alerting the outgoing alarms). They also keep up on how to evade filters. There is enough money in the few who do respond to pay out more for sending. Miss Betsy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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