Got this message this morning from the live.com domain (good indicator it is fake, for one, the person could have used an email from the Strickman Ripps domain).
Strickman-ripps, inc. says (9:56 AM):
Hi Yert...I work for strickman-ripps, a market research company in NYC and found a comment of yours on the microsoft blog. I have a letter to send to you with details about participating in a video chat focus group study we are going to be conducting very soon. what is the best e-mail to send you this letter to. it pays $100 in a visa cash card! thanks, carolyn
How the hell did spammers get my Messenger address? I’m guessing through the button on this blog, but since they ask for an email address, I’m guessing maybe not.
Anyways, Microsoft has my contact information in extensive ways. If they wanted a third party to actually do market research with me, they would have just emailed me, or called me.
The domain would have been the top search result for the company. The message I got would not screw up grammar. The company name (if it was the name of someone in an email, on Twitter, or even perhaps an IM,) would be capitalized correctly.
I’m not sure how this scam would pay out for the scammers aside from getting someone to slowly trust them as they got my contact information. In any case, I reported this as abuse and blocked the sender.
Anyone have any clues about this? I looked up the company in question, despite believing it was a scam. As much as I would love an extra $100, I’m not going to fall for some scam.
Update: Not a Scam. I had my paranoia in overdrive. Fortunately Long Zheng set me straight with his blog post here.
1 comments:
One of them just e-mailed me. The full version of the offer is even more peculiar:
dansdata.blogsome.com/2009/07/03/nobody-say-anything-about-this-secret-microsoft-survey-ok
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