“Contact Them” Spam Software Hits my Inbox – Promises $4,800/month!

I am always interested in new ways to monetize my blog and make money online. Yesterday I received an email that peeked my interest. It appeared to be highly personalized, specific to my blog, and was very complimentary about my writing and traffic levels. A lesser person might have been suckered.

Yes, the email could have been spam, but they said I could have up to $4,800 a month for my content. That’s a heck of a lot better than the $1.04 I have earned this week with TextLinkAds. A lesser person might have succumb to temptation.

Here is the email that attempted to capitalize on my vanity, pride, and plain old greed:

We’ve seen your website at https://www.thorschrock.com
and we love it! We are very impressed with
your content and would like to work with you.

We see that your traffic rank is 240557
and your link popularity is 12.
Also, you have been online since 26/11/2002.

With that kind of traffic, we will pay you up to $4,800/month
to advertise our links on your website.

As my feet settled back down to Earth I looked at the email from a coding perspective. I could imagine each bit of “personal” information looking less like “we see your traffic rank as 240557” and more like “we see your traffic traffic rank as $alexa_rank”.

I decided to do some searching and see if I could find anything more about where this email came from that toyed with my basic human emotions.

I tracked the email all the way back to its evil source. It turns out that a guy named Stephan Ducharme (pronounced douche-are-me) has a software package that scrapes information off the web and then blasts unsuspecting webmasters and bloggers with dreams of *up-to* a gagjillian dollars.

So I decided to see how far this Douche-are-me fan would go. Here is what I emailed back to the spammer:

Thank you so much for your kind words! I have been working hard to get my Alexa numbers up and it is nice that people are noticing!

Let me know what kind of ads you want to place on my website and what kind of performance would be required to sustain a long-term advertising commitment.

I am looking forward to hearing from you!

Its only fair I guess… They wasted my time, so I suppose I should waste a little of theirs as well 🙂