Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
It looks like the evil email spam bots have discovered my little virtual neighborhood. Tom Matrullo received a junk email seemingly addressed by me today, at the exact time I also received an email from me with the same subject. Well, since I didn’t send an email with the following in it, I knew it was junk:
I AM JONATHAN KANU , A MEMBER OF THE BOARD OF RWA AGENCY. WE ARE EMPOWERED TO ADMINISTER TRUST FUND WELL OVER TEWNTY FOUR MILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS (US$300,000.000. 00) FOR THE PROVISION OF RELIEF MATERIALS TO TROUBLED SPOT IN THE WEST AFRICAN SUB-REGION.
I wrote the following to Tom as likely explanation of what happened:
You have people who link to you that also link to me (we’re only 1 degree of separation apart in the loosely joined pieces game). It would be very easy for a spam bot to grab these links and follow them back to our respective weblogs. Both you and I also embed our email addresses directly in our web pages with the mailto hypertext link. This means our email addresses are easily scrapped from the page.
The very nature of weblogging makes this type of spam bot activity easier, because we all link to each other – we provide a web of opportunity for these nasty little critters.
What we’ll need to do is send our agents in South Africa, Mike and Nithia, out to beat the crap out of this JONATHAN KANU.
Show him not to mess around with webloggers.
