I’ve noticed that in the past few months, I’ve been receiving several emails with the same subject line and message but from different names/persons & email addresses. The subject is “Advertising on jaypeeonline.net” and the messages all contain the exact same message:
Hello,
I’d like to inquire if it’s possible to purchase advertising space on your website.
If there is any space available please let me know and we could discuss further details.
I’m looking forward to your positive reply.
Thanks,
John Doe
I receive quite a few of legit advertising offers so this wasn’t something new or peculiar to me. Also, the first couple of emails were sent months apart from the recent ones so I promptly replied to them, thinking that the persons were really interested in advertising on my blog. But after I received several more emails that had the same subject line and message, I started to become suspicious.
After doing some research, I discovered that these types of emails are common practice for spammers. They send out these website advertising inquiry spam emails in an effort to acquire the email address of bloggers or website owners. Once they get the email address, they could add it to their own database or sell it to interested parties.
I don’t provide a link to my email address (mailto link) on my blog so these spammers are sending the messages via the Contact page and wait for me to reply to them so they could acquire my email address.
One thing I noticed aside from the same subject line and message, was that the names of the senders were mostly female and they use common English names. Another proof that these emails are not legit, is that I never got any response from the ones I replied to. If they were really interested in advertising on my blog, they would’ve replied to my emails.
I’m sharing this with you guys so that in case you receive these types of emails in the near future, you won’t make the mistake of responding or replying to them even if the notion of earning money from advertising is very tempting. Just delete or ignore those emails.
Anyone else received these types of emails from your blog or website? If you did, were you accommodating enough to reply to them or you immediately found them suspicious and ignored/deleted them? Please share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.
[image source: flickr.com/photos/clement127]
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