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Marketing Hall of Shame: Automated Car Warranty Calls
If you own a phone, even a work or cell phone, you’ve probably gotten this call. It can come from a variety of source numbers (often spoofed or otherwise masked), and it’s always an automated recording. It usually claims to be the “second and final” notice (even after multiple calls), and it warns the recipient [...]
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Through rain, or snow, or sleet, or hail… This mailman won’t bring the junk mail
The latest news in the fight on junk mail: a mailman is taking sides in the battle.
Steven Padgett, a mailman in Apex, NC, received probation in federal court last week for refusing to deliver junk mail to the people on his route. For at least seven years, he took the junk mail home, stored it [...]
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In the News: A Small Respite from Spam
Some good news on the spam front this month: worldwide spam was cut in half when a single web hosting firm was shut down, The Washington Post reported. McColo Corp, a company based in San Jose, California (but claiming a Delaware mailing address), allegedly operated servers that sent spam messages for various international groups. These clients, in [...]
Marketing Hall of Shame: Cleanse Your Colon (And Your Grasp of Reality)
I received this spam email a few days ago. The subject line caught me first: “Cleanse and Flush up to 20lbs from your colon!” The rest of the email reads like this:
Lose Weight With Your Mate! – Flush out up to 25 pounds – Remove Deadly Toxic Buildup – Relieve Constipation and Bloating – Best of [...]
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Marketing Hall of Shame – SPAM Email #135 – Thailand LOTTO!
The scary thing about this email is not that someone was able to find my address and send it to me (unsolicited albeit), but rather that people must be responding to it….
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Charity Telemarketers: Should You Give?
At this festive time of year, you might notice a few more phone calls than usual. The holidays are a prime time for telemarketers to amp up their solicitations and try harder to get your business. And if you’re on the Do Not Call List (which you should be), you could still get calls from charities working to [...]
Happy Holidays, Unhappy Environment
The holidays are coming, and that means more unsolicited catalogs and direct mail offers crammed into your mailbox than ever. While unsolicited mail is annoying at any time of year, the flood of junk mail usually hits hardest in November and December, all in the hopes that you’ll make holiday purchases from the piles of possible vendors that the postman [...]
The tried-and-true identity theft technique: Talking you into giving up your information
This week, I had the good fortune to see a presentation by Kevin Mitnick, the former hacker who now makes a living as a security consultant. I went into the talk expecting a 90-minute lesson on the latest tools and toys that hackers might use to steal my identity. Instead, Mitnick’s very engaging lecture was [...]
