So I got an awesome spam email this morning which read as follows.
Intriguing to the naive and terminally clueless
I have seen millions of things like this and usually pass them around to my colleagues and associates. So as we were commenting about it in the Google Waves my colleague Heman Patel found the confirmation URL that is sent after you purchase the e-book. We simply added an email address and a name and promptly received the e-book. We are currently looking at it and it seems to be mostly made up of useless crap with a few basic recommendations sprinkled throughout. All of which you can get for free pretty easily with just a few searches. That being said, if you are going to set yourself up as an expert at search marketing maybe you should not leave such a huge back door wide open.
So what did we find?
We did a little crawling (like a robots) around and found something interesting. When we grabbed an interesting URL, which was very easy to find even if it was not in the Googles and ended up on this page. Simple enough.
We then just added an email address and a username to confirm. Once we were confirmed as paying users we were provided with the link to download the e-book.
Again, the book contained some useful, if basic, information and a lot of bad information. I could critique that but I am more interested in critiquing the spammy nature of the email and laugh at the fact that a “make money online” scam was so easy to game.
Related posts:
