Things Aren't Always What They Seem

I love reading the emails that make it past my rather aggressive Spam filter each morning.

This morning, I received one addressed to my free holiday property rental site PrivateVilla.co.uk that reads as follows:

Good day :) I'll cut the chase and be straight forward to save you time. I
am working on behalf of a leading mobile phone network provider looking to
promote and source traffic from reliable sites such as yours. I've noticed
that you are running several links in your website and was wondering if
you'd be interested in allowing us to sponsor a simple two-word text link
within your website.

I hope that you're interested and do feel free to contact me anytime
regarding your terms :)

Company Name
Marketing Manager

I did what I always do (being a curious sceptic) and clicked on the email address of the sender to find the domain it was sent from, as I like to know how companies involved in link marketing present themselves to their clients (if they are genuine of course).

In this case, there was no web site, just a root directory telling me that the cgi-bin was only created yesterday.

So I did a whois on the domain and found it was only registered in March. Not to a company, but to an individual.

This email, I assume then, is nothing more than a Spam operator looking to confirm email addresses. I guess that if I'd responded to the email, this particular email address would end up on everyone else's Spamming list and I'd have to start buying all of those enlargement patchs all over again!

Online, you can be anyone you want to be and hide behind a web site, claiming expertise that you don't have. There's a world of opportunity out there for the less than honest.

The great news is that there's a bigger world of opportunity out there for the honest, hard working individuals like you and I.