From time to time, I have kept on eye on spam activity and viral content that turned out to be spam (or at least commercial). Someone entered an item in the comments on this blog and when I checked it out, it seems spammy to me. I post this item to shine a light.
The thing purports to be an attempt to deliver a marriage proposal virally:
You could help me a lot to spread my proposal to Mary – it is important that it is distributed as widely as possible so that it eventually reaches Mary. If you would like to support my proposal to Mary, please send the following text by email to a lot of people
————- SNIP (email text end) —————
WHEN YOU RECEIVE THIS, PLEASE HELP TO DISTRIBUTE IT TO OTHER PEOPLE!
The guy has supposedly created a website called Proposal to Mary (I’m deliberately not using the URL). He wants this message to be spread far and wide, encouraging people to forward it or post it.
He claims to be a German software developer, but I found multiple posts with the same e-mail address but identified as from Finland.
It’s not clear here what the scam is, but I do smell one. I just read this blog post, which also identifies this effort as a scam, and it says that the guy’s site is down. Which it is, even though it was up earlier today. [Site back up, as of the next morning.]
Tags: Proposal to Mary, spam