Fun_People Archive
2 Oct
The Perfect E-Mail Address Harvesting Scam

Content-Type: text/plain
Mime-Version: 1.0 (NeXT Mail 3.3 v118.2)
From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Mon,  2 Oct 100 19:29:43 -0700
To: Fun_People
Precedence: bulk
Subject: The Perfect E-Mail Address Harvesting Scam

X-Lib-of-Cong-ISSN: 1098-7649  -=[ Fun_People ]=-
X-http://www.langston.com/psl-bin/Fun_People.cgi
From: Merritt, Anne M

So we've seen sites that harvest your address (register now!), try to
harvest your friends addresses (imdb.com - send this page to a friend!)
but now I've  seen an even better one - it harvests addresses of people
you don't particularly like!

	http://www.justatip.com

I tend to consider any site that asks for email addresses, particularly
when they're not one's own, to be a potential spam harvester.  This one
takes the cake, though.

It gives you an interface to send people anonymous 'tips' telling them
something you would never tell them to their face, like they're incompetent,
or have bad breath, or have bad gas.  It then sends them a mail message -
if it doesn't bounce, voila!  Another valid email address harvested!  The
best part of it is, of course, that you, the origin of the address, probably
don't give a rip if the victim receives 80 gig of spam as a result of your
giving out that address.

The even better part is where the tip site tries to sell the victim crap
to solve the problem he's being tipped about.  And of course, the privacy
policy doesn't say anything about not reselling the harvested email
addresses, particularly of suckers, to another spammer, even if the victim
can opt out of the tip receipt itself.  After all, they're just trying to
'help'...

© 2000 Peter Langston