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Saturday, August 04, 2007

Bad spam marketing
I received this email in the inbox addressed to the "editor" of one of our publications. Note, any identifying contact information has been removed -- I don't wish to give these guys any more 'free publicity'

Aug 2007
New web site launch up in smoke?
When America went to check out the new real estate web site www.spamspam
many were very upset. It turns out another company is selling drug paraphernalia at a similar site www.spamspam. Those who left the word out of the web address found pipes and papers, not property for sale.
Parents called in upset; others sent email complaining that they were looking to buy or sell a house not drug pipes and rolling papers.
Now the executives at the real estate are scrambling to figure out what to do. Change the name of the real estate company? Buy out the other company?
We want to apologize to those offended and assure everyone we are working on solving the problem. If you want to talk with the
mediamedia@spamspam staff email us at media@spamspam or call us at 555 555-5555.

My suspicions were aroused by the way this thing was worded; and a true red flag went up when I checked the whois registration of the two relevant domains. One, for the drug stuff, uses an anonymous domain service, so cannot be traced, but the registration date and term of the domain almost exactly matches the real estate operation! Now coincidences are possible, but this is far too obvious a coincidence for me.


Clearly, any publicity promoting this druggy real estate service -- even negative -- might do them some good -- so I am certainly not going to identify them. But I will track through Google News and other resources to see if their bit of media spam actually works.
I'm hopeful (and optimistic) that it won't.

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