SPAM, SPAM, and more SPAM!

Don't you just love it!  Want to get more?  I sure don't!  Read below!

If you enjoy receiving SPAM, please join all the "ring-friend" groups you wish. FILETOPIA does not ask for your email address, or harvest information from your computer. Please DO NOT invite me to join your group and share in your SPAM, I receive enough of my own.

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Posts from a web developers blog regarding one group of "ring-friends":

What I do recall is a massive table with 15 people added from my contacts, and 419 invitations automatically sent. The lower half, the 419 invitations, was green, with a 1px black-ish border. It looked very much like they just fed my contact list straight to their mailing list manager.

I find it highly unlikely I would have selected to add all 419 contacts by clicking each individual name and email address, or the "all" checkbox you see on step 2 of an import, then clicked "add friend" without realizing.

Looking at step 2, I don't see them saying it'll email things. I just asked my roommate, who signed up ages ago. I didn't feed him the story or prompt from details, I just asked him what happened when he signed up. He pretty much said it took about 140 of his hotmail contacts in a manner identical to mine.

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If a knowledgeable web developer can fall for these scams, anyone can, especially Internet newbies.

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And this, from another group on Yahoo: Please ignore this. Apparently, Hi5.com grabs your contact list (some reports say automatically, others say you have to volunteer it), then proceeds to spam them with your name with these dopey invites.

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You should realize, harvesting email addresses is a big business to spammers. The lists can be sold and resold thousands of times. I receive over 150 spam emails everyday because of groups I signed up with (many years ago) before I knew better, but I never sent an email to another suggesting they should join my group. After all these years, I am still receiving spam from spammers who purchased their lists!

If you have found a group you truly enjoy, I'm happy for you. Thank you for thinking of me, but please don't send me an invitation to join your group. When you do so, you are simply adding my email address to some spammers list. Thanks, but no thanks!

I hope you'll pass this information to your friends who invite you to join their "really cool group!"