Back in December, we stumbled upon a company called Customer Club - we’d begun receiving newsletters from them on behalf of Borders, shortly before the bookstore went into administration. Customer Club then requested those on the mailing list join them directly – it seemed that the parent company, The Marketing Innovation Group, had acquired Borders’ mailing list and were using it for their own purposes.

Their activity was previously ambiguous enough to warrant only suspicion – they were emailing addresses on the mailing lists about activities and subscriptions connected to Borders – albeit very loosely. Now it seems fair to say the Marketing Innovation Group are flat-out abusing the mailing lists with spam. Avid Bitterwallet reader Richard received a newsletter from The Customer Club yesterday, sent on behalf of Habitat – a newsletter he never requested (it can’t even be explained away as a relevant third party interest), and one sent to the email address he’d specified for his Borders newsletter:

We called The Marketing Innovation Group, and the phone went dead. We went to their website, and that wasn’t working either. Nor was the consumer-facing website for The Customer Club. We’ll keep trying to get in touch with them – they’re probably aware that buying up personal data for a use not relevant to its initial collection, is the sort of thing the ICO isn’t too thrilled to see.

Ah, you cheeky spam-meisters, currently causing chaos on Twitter right now. As good as you are, you’re not going to convince me my brother is a horny 24 year-old chick.

You have, however, made a drab day a little brighter, not only by making our MPs look slightly dickish, but by hijacking the accounts of major companies stupid enough to click on your links:

[The Consumerist]

A while ago we called out Amazon for bothering customers with product recommendations via email for the heinous crime of browsing the site and not buying anything. Now GAME.co.uk are doing something similar but they’re not quite so subtle:

GAME: Go On, You Know You Want It!

We noticed that you are interested in this product but then decided against purchasing. Maybe you got distracted, maybe you were about to be spotted shopping at work by your boss, maybe you just didn’t fancy buying it just then. Either way we just wanted to let you know that it’s still available if you want it.

This was what avid Bitterwallet reader James received after browsing through a few games on the site. Yes, GAME will now email you and chastise you if you don’t buy something from them. Worse still, the only option we can find in our account is for opting in and out of their weekly newsletter – so unlike Amazon’s recommendation emails, it doesn’t appear you can opt out from this… what’s the word we’re stretching for… spam. As James points out – if every website we registered with sent an email every time we glanced at it, our inboxes would be heaving.

But the real question is, why didn’t James buy from GAME? What the hell was he playing at?

All those maybe’s, but one maybe they didn’t include but should have – “Maybe you didn’t buy it because you saw it cheaper elsewhere”.

Nobody ever gets sucked into scam emails these days. Ever. Trial and error has taught us well, and you’re certainly not going to get anything by the geeks. They’ve seen spam in every shape and size, and there’s nothing that ca- woah, a Google Wave invite! We’ve got one! Woop!

Let’s get this mother opened up and we’ll head on over to googlewaveinvitation.com an-

Damn. Back to offering Air India-style favours for an invite, then.

Occasionally we have a peek into the Bitterwallet spam box, to see if anything palatable has slipped by in error. Regardless of whether we find anything of use, we like to share the contents. It’s usually a mish-mash of porn, pills and Nigerian girls in mortal danger, as well as a string of prompts to arouse our curiosity. But mostly it’s a lot of old cock:

To be honest, the beer one did look tempting. Have a quick look in your spam filter today – what’s the stupidest subject line you can find? Slap it in the comments below and you could be receiving a much-coveted Bitterwallet bag o’nowt.

We’ve reported on Facebook’s email invitation spam before and now a Bitterwallet reader flags the info that Facebook have become even more aggressive with email invitations.

Jim Carpenter has commented on the previous Facebook spam post:

Just found out that if you use the Share button under a photo or something and give an e-mail address then that e-mail address will show up on the list of people you have invited to Facebook AND they will start to automatically send “Reminder: Jim invited you to join Facebook…” spam! I just wanted to share something, not invite the person to FB and certainly not have FB spam them!!!!

Scumbags…

When sharing a photo with friends or family the expected use of that personal email address is a one-time invitation to view the photos – not a continued marketing effort from Facebook asking your friend to join the site. As Jim says the email is given to Facebook for the purpose of sharing that photo, instead Facebook is storing the email address for future marketing use and implying the original sender wants the recipient to “join Facebook”.

It’s not easy to remove email addresses from the “invitation list” either. Mac Homer also left a comment about his experience trying to mass delete from the list. Every time he tried to do a mass removal of addresses he got the error: “Oops! Something went wrong. We’re working on getting this fixed as soon as we can. You may be able to try again.” He was only able to remove email addresses from the list one at a time.

Last time we asked the question of whether this use of email addresses is permitted by UK email marketing law. We’re going to follow up on that to try and get an answer but if you have any more thoughts, input or experiences with Facebook invitation spam please let us know in the comments!

Delving into the dank, swampy recesses of the Bitterwallet spam filter earlier today was a little disheartening. Gone are the offers to enlarge my penis and get me some yankee doodle tonight. Even the desperate pleas of children who lost their father, a Nigerian ambassador to the United States, are a little thin on the ground.

No special offers on big brand electronics, no pharmaceutically induced pleasures; instead there was mail after mail that made less sense than an angry nun. The spam filter cleaned up any viruses left lurking, but would you bother clicking on these titles anyway? Is there some sort of inter-breeding that’s spawning pointless six-toed hicks? Why?

With the galactic success of iTunes in no doubt, it was only a matter of time before the spam-meisters got involved and tried their luck.  With tens of millions accounts worldwide, a scattershot approach through bulk spamming will reach an intended target plenty of times over.

Webuser reports that security researchers have seen an email being spammed out in high volumes, posing as an iTunes receipt. In fact it’s a scam to persuade you to buy medications and Valentine’s Day gifts. You know what kind of medications.

There’s no malware attached to the email; it simply redirects users through to third party sites. Having said that, anybody buying a Valentine’s Day gift from an online pharmacy is probably in a doomed relationship anyway, so maybe it’s for the best.

[webuser]

Another sign that we’re heading towards a global depression is the resurgence in popularity of Spam in the US.

Sales of the cheap, recession-proof canned luncheon meat are rocketing as Americans turn their back on pricier meat products and get back to basics. Who knows, maybe they’re even using the stuff to fill the cracks in their falling down houses as well.

Restaurants in Austin, Minnesota, where they churn the stuff out, are promoting special Spam-heavy menus, including Spamburgers, Spam and pineapple pizza, and the mysterious SPAMarama meal deal.

Oh, and Lobster Thermidor a Crevette with a mornay sauce served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and with a fried egg on top and spam.

Which obviously leads us to…

If you’re wondering how often people these days fall for spam mail, Security researchers from the University of California, San Diego and UC Berkeley say that it’s probably lower than you expected. 

In an interesting research study, a group of computer scientists hacked into the spammer’s Storm network, which uses “bots” to send junk email to hijacked home computers. They found that spammers only make one sale in every 12.5 million messages sent.

The research group set up a fake pharmacy website and basically hijacked the hijackers’ system to send out advertisements that would lead responders to their site. If a respondent were to try and enter their credit card information to purchase pharmaceuticals, they were taken to an error page. (but surely this invalidates the study, since respondents may not have gone through with it?)

Although 350 million email messages sent over 26 days only resulted in only 28 sales, the study concluded that if many more messages were sent, Storm owners could be earning £4,500 a day, or £1.6m a year.  That’s quite a bit of passive income for annoying people, but the estimate is probably much lower than what most people perceive spammers to be earning.

[The Register via Computer Weekly]

In a move that should make no difference whatsoever, a massive spam-sending ring has been busted and shut down. However, experts believe that another one will be along in a few minutes to plug the gap and continue to bombard us all with pointless and annoying messages offering us magical drugs that will make our wing-wangs longer. Great.

According to the nonprofit antispam research group SpamHaus, the group, known as HerbalKing, were sending as much as a third of all the unsolicited and unwanted emails in the world before their global operation was smashed open by cybercops. Possibly in a scene that resembled something from Tron.

As a sort-of tribute, here’s some of HerbalKing’s greatest hits. We shall never see their like again. Oh hang on, we’ve just had six more in the last minute.
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