Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Text Spammer from Hawaii? Nope.


Received this from 808-221-6738:
Your entry in our drawing WON you a FREE $500 Target Giftcard! Enter "808" at www.target.com.tltv.biz to claim it and we can ship it to you immediately!
 This text has also been sent from the following numbers:
  • 714-264-5281
  • 612-244-6187
  • 786-227-1051
  • 419-377-6208
  • 714-227-5949
  • 714-227-4168
  • 612-244-9504
  • 714-227-5525
Going to the link brings you to this

According to the spamtext I got, the "code" I'm expected to enter is my area code. Having tried this a couple of times, I've discovered that you can enter any three numbers, which will then be "validated" by the system. Not surprisingly, each time I was told told that I had a winning code, whereupon I was redirected to this

Naturally, what the spammer wants is your email address, so they can spam the living shit out of it and so they can sell a confirmed active email address on the market where spammers buy and sell email addresses to each other.

I seriously doubt if there have been any gift cards from Target given away through this site. Like many sites of a similar nature, it's all about finding valid email addresses to add to spam lists. Like other major retailers, Target doesn't need to reply on textspammers to get people to want their gift cards. That's what advertising is for.

Unfortunately, a WHOIS search for myrewardshouse.com reveals nothing beyond the knowledge that the website owner has enabled WhoIs Guard to prevent people like me from finding out who they really are. But, you can file a complaint against them with Namecheap by going to the Support page.

A mean-spirited person may be tempted to go to the webpage and enter any random set of numbers; upon getting to the next page, they could enter any made-up email address that they feel like. For example, I get a lot of 419 scam letters and I may enter the Reply-To address of the scammers, so they can get spammed by these assclowns. However, that would be very cruel of me, as the scammers email address could soon be filled with spam. And we wouldn't want that, would we?


Duane Browning




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