Why PayPal / Gmail “Blasters” Are A Colossally Stupid Idea

In this post, I’m going to be just a bit more direct than normal (as can be deduced from reading the word “stupid” in the title). It amazes me that people actually believe the outright lies that are written in some spam emails.

Here’s the text of a spam email that hit my Inbox today:

Dear Website Owner:

We Send To 44 Million Verified PayPal Members!

Safe & Effective Mass Marketing Doesn’t Need To
Cost A Fortune!

We have jam-packed program with over 44 Million
email addresses of verified PayPal users across the globe.
We now have access to PayPal users from close to 190
countries worldwide.

In a matter of seconds you can send your advertisement
from our servers to entire database and never have to
concern yourself with a spam complaint. All ads are sent
from our system.

Click Here To Get Instant Access

You simply login to access your member’s area, fill out
our simple to use submission form and hit SEND.

That’s it! There’s nothing more to do but wait your
TRAFFIC to explode.

Allow me to tell you why taking advantage of such a “service” (whether it be for PayPal, Gmail, or anything else) is just plain ol’ STUPID.

First up: “Safe and effective mass marketing”. It’s not safe. It’s spam. You do not have an established business relationship with 44 million verified PayPal members, and quite frankly, when I get those emails in my PayPal account, it irritates me to no end. My PayPal account is for PayPal transactions AND NOTHING ELSE, and when a young, foolish “get rick quick” wanna-be figures out a way to invade the sanctity of my PayPal Inbox, they go onto a special list called “junk email” — and quite frankly, even if my next meal depended on responding to an offer from that person, whether it be today, tomorrow, or whenever — and even if they were ultra successful and were the only source of what I needed — I’d do without. I hate spammers!

Which leads to my next complaint: It doesn’t matter who sends the stuff out, it’s still spam. It’s unsolicited, you don’t have a business relationship established with the person, etc.

Besides, let’s look at another issue: Where in the world would somebody outside of PayPal be able to get 44,000,000 email addresses of PayPal members (the answer: they can’t, at least not by legal / ethical means. Feel like supporting criminal activity?)? Quite frankly (and quite thankfully), I only get a few emails like this into my PayPal account every month, so just how effective is such a blast? If a firm is unethical enough to promise you the world (or at least 44,000,000 members of it) — an “over the top” promise if I’ve ever heard one — then what makes you think that they’ll actually deliver on their promise? What proof do you think you would get that they actually sent 44,000,000 emails?

Try this: Open a PayPal account, use it to buy a few things (let me know if you need help finding stuff to buy… ), then use one of these services. I’m willing to bet that you’ll never receive your own email. And if you didn’t receive it, guess how many other PayPal members didn’t receive it? That’s right; I’d guess around 44,000,000 of ‘em…

That should take care of the “effective” claim, don’t you think?

The bottom line is that this is just another scammy-smelling “get rich quick” scheme. “Simply login… and hit SEND.” This is nothing more than the promise of lots of cash by doing practically nothing — and as I’ve said at least a hundred times, if it were easy, then everybody would be doing it and everybody would be rich. But not everybody has money, nor is everybody rich, and while it may be a bit of a logic trap to some, THIS KIND OF STUFF DOESN’T WORK AND YOU ARE A FOOL IF YOU FALL FOR IT.

Now let’s look at the “behind the scenes stuff”. The domain listed in the “From” address (internetbizatitsbest dot com) shows an IP address of 64.202.189.170, which is registered to GoDaddy.com (which would make it very easy if I really wanted to cause problems… Thankfully I think that this person won’t last long because they’ll keep sending their money down the drain). However, the email was sent from 78.109.160.8, which resolves to “ukfast.net” but was listed as being received from mail.com by Google’s email servers.

So the sender had to resort to some trickery to get it sent. Perhaps they are sending the email from the hacked PCs of home and business users? Can anybody say “botnet”? I just love it when lawbreakers support criminals…

Is this the kind of people you want to support? Do you want to see these kinds of people profit and prosper? If your answer is “NO”, then don’t EVER respond to an email like this.

Oh, I almost forgot: The WHOIS info shows that the domain was created on October 19, 2009 and has been in existence for a grand total of three months. I’m positive that they can send you the names of thousands of satisfied customers that they’ve acquired through the years… NOT! Of course, you could just email the domain name owner and ask them yourself if you want a second opinion (OOPS, probably shouldn’t have hyperlinked that email address… it might get picked up by the spam bots…).

One last thing: I suspect that anybody with any level of business success will look upon your spammy email the same way that I did. None of the successful business people are going to click on your link and use your service. In fact, I’m willing to bet that 99% of them will never even see your email, much less open it (I only saw it because monitoring spam trends is a part of my computer security routine). So the only people who will respond to it (most likely) are the “newbies” — people just starting out who don’t know any better. In my view, this is nothing more than taking advantage of those who are just starting out who do not know how Internet-based marketing really works. This, in my view, makes them predators — kind of like stealing candy from babies.

Disgusting.

So remember: NEVER click on a link in an unsolicited email (as well as never opening an attachment you weren’t expecting). Don’t support spammers (and protect your business by not becoming one yourself. Can your business afford $15,000 per CAN-SPAM complaint?)! Stop “hoping” that these easy systems will work. Do the hard work, commit yourself to building an honest business. You only make yourself look like a fool when you use these dubious “services”.