Targetted Spam

November 14th, 2006

I just recieved an email with the subject of “RE: Michigan Football Tailgate” that advised me to buy some stock in West Excelsior Inc. Normally I’m good at not opening these types of emails, but this one got me. It just happened that I had an email in my inbox with a subject of “Michigan Football Part” and a “RE: Michigan Football Party”.

Is it targetted spam? Do they know something about me and my alma matter? It’s probably just a coincidence, but how long until we actually start getting targetted spam?

Just think about all the information we leave out on the net on a daily basis. How hard would it be for somebody to start mining information about us for the purposes of spamming us? We send targetted marketing emails out for work every day, I guess targetted spam is the next evolution. The football one is a new idea. It wouldn’t be that hard to geolocate email addresses and insert a local sports team into the subject. (of course, it all depends on how you scraped the emails right?)

Anyway… It’s now Spammers: 1 Ryan: 0

Note: WEXE is actually up 2% at the time of this writing, should I have bought? Typically these stocks all do good briefly, then crash hard as the original spammers sell off all the shares they bought prior to sending out the spam.

Update: it’s trending to crash… each localized maximum of it’s graph is less than the previous… a typical “day trading” trend which means it’s not going to go up.

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