The Bot Who Loved Me
from the how-sweet dept
Salon has an article about a particular "crush" site that many people suspsect is really a sneaky spam scam. There have been a number of "crush" sites that ask you to enter in the email of someone you have a crush on. Then they email that person and make them guess who the person is. However, this particular site has been sending out a ridiculous number of crush emails - leading people to believe it was actually a spam front. The theory was that they bought spam lists, spammed everyone as if they had a crush - and then used all the new email addresses that were entered for more spam. Whoever was behind the site was hidden away. However, some geeks finally tracked them down - and they swear there's no spamming involved. However, there certainly are some questionable marketing practices.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Dur-hey.
It's really insidious too. I mean, who wouldn't want to know who has a crush on them? And then the people who's email addresses you entered, who you do not actuall have a crush on, will want to know who has a crush on them too, etc.
The entire system is almost completely useless for it's stated purpose (ie, discretely finding out if person X could be romantically interested in you). Pretty much the only thing it is useful for would be harvesting emails.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]