Spam spam spam spammity spam

[gothwalk]

Sometimes, I really can't work out what spammers are after. A list I'm on was vigourously bombarded - about 50 copies got through before an admin got on the case - with a listing of reg codes for Microsoft stuff, up to and including a beta build of Longhorn. I can see why someone might send a single copy, but not 50. And there's no benefit in sight.

And there's a very well written one in this morning to Swiftpay from "Elizabeth Richson", saying that she writes for a website, has linked to us, and would we be interested in linking back to her? Apparently she found us by searching for a given search term, which is one that you'd reasonably find Swiftpay on. If it wasn't for the slightly klunky line of "My site is all about Finance - Misc too", I wouldn't even have glanced at the headers. But it turns out to be from a non-existent domain, and in something mildly mindboggling, googling for that name gives a total of two results, neither connected in any way to finance sites. So a mail asking for a link to a site which doesn't seem to exist, from an email address that can't be replied to, which was generated by a clever program tripped up only by the fact that the category the site is listed under didn't fit as a natural language noun. Why? How can anyone possibly profit by sending this?

Comments

Re: I received the same

[(Anonymous)]

Hello all… I’M Clive Webmaster for the writer’s voice where we have 6,500 files of stories and Poems all text files, so it is not unlikely to be found by the search engines because we have 120 mg of text. Our site sells nothing and was found by Elizabeth Richson looking for terrycloth -- not going to find it on my site. This must be a verification to find out what primary addresses are, from what are used on the website. I receive 500 to 600 e-mails a day and causes me real grief because I have to check to see if it is a submission coming in under a different mail address.

When anyone wants to link me from their site I want to see what and who they are and if I wish to be associated with them or their site. The http://www.writers-voice.com is a family orientated type-site and I protect it.

I have also received spam to the web-mail forms I have placed on my site to handle poem and story submissions. The one below I got many times a day causing me real time loss from working my site.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Title: spaininpain@aol.com
To: spaininpain@aol.com
From: spaininpain@aol.com
Subject: pc(3D1B0737,Title)2yoa
jsa

I think as long as large drug manufacturers are allowed to sell to people that will use this type of sales and marketing we will never be rid of it.

Clive
Webmaster
The Writers Voice

Possible motive?

[(Anonymous)]

I did a nslookup on the originating IP and saw that the IP also hosts a domain called echeckservice.com

Possibly, they're getting ready to start collection bank account information?

They seem to have some kind of automated address harvesting bot, they sent the message to all of the addresses on my "contacts" page.

Re: Possible motive?

[(Anonymous)]

I'm one of you guys. Madame Elizabeth hits me too this morning.
I can't figure out what's behind this spam.