SPAMMED!!!!

I’ve been in the Internet marketing, search engine marketing and freelance writing business for some time now and I used to claim that I know all the friggin’ dirty antics people can pull to get a hold on tens of thousands of email addresses and spam these people like crazy. The reason is, they’re basically playing the misconstrued, web-version of the ‘Numbers Game’. The more people you hit, the higher your chances of scoring, right? Absolutely.

I also remember how I used to collect email addresses from forums….cut, paste, cut, paste…open email account, paste email, copy message, SHOOT THEM ALL OUT!

And during the early days as an internet marketing specialist with a dotbomb, there was also a time that my innocent and fresh (fully absorbent) mind was exposed to unscrupulous ways of winning the search engines over. Stuff like hiding the keyword text into the background was common…everybody did it….well, unless Google got so big that they could afford to hire people, found out about such deceptive efforts, Google made no bone but banning these people from their listings!

Everyone went berserk!! It was like a sudden lights-out and everyone goes, “Where’s my listing? What happened? What did you do? Call the farking hosting company up, what’d they do?” Lots of finger-pointing and then we realized that Google is dead-serious about spam.

Anyway, I’ve not done these for a long time now (I swear). In fact, viral or over-aggressive marketing tend to annoy more people than it does impress? And the people who are impressed with spam-mish tactics aren’t too bright or too tech-savvy, I guess.

Sadly, I found myself victim to such an antic…and it was like a slap in the face when I realized what was going on!

I got an email from someone asking for a quote. In that email, the sender was quick to give me a link to a webpage (site) that when I clicked on, nothing appeared. I replied the email…something along the lines of “I don’t see the web page, please resend and I will give you rough estimate”.

Then I went to sleep.

Then I wake up in the morning. Then I switched on my computer and found 12 messages waiting for me from, from a remotely similar name. Monique Beatrado, Monica Beans, Monic Benatrido, Moniqa B….

Tiu!!!!

I open it and saw that it’s nothing but spam advertisements…like one of those that promotes from penis enlargement thing or something. Come to think of it, how would I have known, anyway? It looks like a genuine email of which I respond to regularly…anyway, I am dead pissed mad that I opened up my personal (I am overprotective of this email address) email address to spam. From now on, I will be a ‘hello stranger’ attitude from me whenever receiving these emails.

You really don’t know who (or what) the other person at the other end of the line is like…