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

Interesting...

[palp.livejournal.com]

I got hit by this as well, this afternoon. The email stated that my site was ranked #32 in Google for 'bad breath picture', which it certainly is not. It's also not in the Health - Beauty category as claimed. The interesting thing, however, is that the email was sent primarily to our donations email address, and was cc'd to me and the other admin on the site. Either these addresses are being harvested by a person, or they have a very clever bot gathering them, because it seems it would otherwise be difficult for them to gather just those three addresses. And, as to the goal of this - I am also at a loss to explain it.

Re: Interesting...

[palp.livejournal.com]

The other thing which I forgot to mention, is the tag at the bottom of the email:

Elizabeth Richson
RAC IM: 431280.


I can't figure out what RAC IM refers to. However, that seems to be the only potentially valid contact method supplied with the email?