I try to go through the spam folder on my email once a week or so, just to make sure that nothing important got put in there by accident. Though I do have to say that Google has an awesome spam detector, I almost never get spam in my inbox, and I can’t recall the last time something important went into spam by mistake. But I still check.
Recently I noticed a trend. Among all the drug offers and advertisments for porn and organ enlargement, there have been ALOT of AARP offers. Like several a day. Now I had been ignoring them, I’m no where near old enough, but today I decided to look at them out of curiosity.
They all appear to be the same at first glance, the subject line is either FREE GIFT or MEET BETTY WHITE, and the inside appears to be a standard “come join us and get this free gift!!!” sort of solicitation that you would expect to get from AARP. There’s just one problem, not one of the links in the email leads to an official AARP site, and the links in each email are different from the next email, as are the email address they come from, and I don’t mean one is from joe blow at AARP and one is from joe smith at AARP, I mean they’re info@RandomWebsiteName where RandomWebsiteName matches the random website that the links to go. And none of them are (up front) valid websites, for example one is konstructionleadersteel.com (where links go to konstructionleadersteel.com/********(random letters and numbers)*****), another is sleepingbabyshop.info, or sleepingangelimages.info. None of them are the same (I only spotted one duplicate in the 28 I’ve received in the last week). So just for the heck of it I copied out the links (so I could go to the link without clicking from the email) and went to the “home” page of a couple. Blank pages. No idea if its just an attempt to get money, or spread a virus, didn’t feel like digging far enough to find out.
I gotta say its pretty slick looking, and since its aimed at a generation that isn’t always comfortable with computers I bet it works on occasion too. Kinda scary.