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Mortgage Brokers in Bed with Spammers
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It seems crystal clear to observers of the spam epidemic that mortgage brokers and morgage lending
companies are deeply in bed with the spammers. They are reportedly paying $20.00 or more for each lead
sold them by the spammers. The information below was posted to the Internet newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email.
It describes what is essentially a sting by the poster to see what sort of responses he would get
if he responsed to many of the spams advertising mortgage services. The results are pretty telling.
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From: silly british knigget
Newsgroups: news.admin.net-abuse.email
Subject: Mortgage loan spammers -- an experiment and a fun little countermeasure
Date: Sat, 13 Mar 2004 14:57:28 -0800
Xref: news-toy.newsread.com news.admin.net-abuse.email:2378556
After receiving gawd-knows how many mortage-loan spam messages,
I decided to perform a little experiment.
I visited one of the spamvertised web-sites and filled out
the on-line application form, using bogus info. For the
contact phone number, I used the number of a little-used
phone (with attached answering machine) in one of the labs
where I work.
Over the next couple of weeks, that number was contacted by *at
least 50* mortgage brokers. I returned a few of the calls
and lectured the brokers about the evils of hiring spammers
to generate their leads. They all played dumb and claimed
that they had no idea that the outfits they were buying
leads from were involved in spamming. One of the brokers
told me that he paid 20 dollars for my (bogus -- heh, heh)
name. I told him to consider it bargain-basement tuition
for a lesson about the evils of doing business with
spammers.
It looks like the whole mortgage-brokerage industry is
in the business of spamming -- they hire "lead generators"
who do the spamming, all the while feigning ignorance
of the spamming activities. It ain't just a couple
of "rogue" brokers. I'll bet the whole lot of 'em are
in on it.
I've decided to fight back in a small sort of way.
When I receive a mortage-loan spam message (and have
a couple of minutes to waste), I visit the spammer's
web-site (with Mozilla -- no cookies enabled, and I
scrub the website URL of any unique identifier strings)
and fill out the application, using the name/phone#/etc.
of a local mortage broker listed in the Yellow Pages.
I suggest that others do the same. Pollute the list
of mortage-leads sold by spammers to mortage brokers
with the names of -- of course -- mortgage brokers!
The thought of mortgage brokers buying a lists of leads
from spammers and then discovering that they paid good money
for their own names/phone#'s certainly appeals to me!
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One reply to the above post by a participant associated with
a major blocklisting anti-spam operation.
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Newsgroups: news.admin.net-abuse.email
Subject: Re: Mortgage loan spammers -- an experiment and a fun little countermeasure
Date: 14 Mar 2004 01:08:34 GMT
silly british knigget wrote in
news:1079212729.344898@news-1.nethere.net:
> It looks like the whole mortgage-brokerage industry is
> in the business of spamming -- they hire "lead generators"
> who do the spamming, all the while feigning ignorance
> of the spamming activities. It ain't just a couple
> of "rogue" brokers. I'll bet the whole lot of 'em are
> in on it.
Thats why one of the research firms recently had me help them with an
article on the affects of the CAN-SPAM act on Mortgage Lenders (and a good
portion of my comments and tips were published, yay!). Apparently, lenders
are starting to get nervous about the whole thing.
I will be rewriting a version of what I sent to the publisher in a new
paper tomorrow or Monday morning. Hopefully it will be rather useful.