Within 12 hours of posting my first message on this forum, I received three email spams from people selling degrees from "Prestigious non-accredited" Universities. Has this happened to anyone else? When I registered I chose to leave my email address visible, but because of this spam attack I'm changing my profile. If you've started receiving spam, you might want to do the same thing. ------------------ Steve OptiBoard Discussion Forums
Sounds like it might not be a bad idea -- although I haven't gotten much of any spam since I stopped posting to alt.education.distance, and my email address is also visible. Hrm. Peace, Tom
The proprietor of the "prestigious nonaccredited degree" enterprise (which is now in its 6th school name, Shelbourne University) sends out more than a million spams a week, according to the authorities in Israel who are on his trail. They told me the Email originates in Romania. So it may or may not be related to this group, but awfully annoying in any event.
John, The reason I made the connection with this forum is becasue I've never received any distance learning spam before. And the few times I posted on the a.e.d newsgroup. I used a munged address to thwart the automatic email harvestors. The oinly time I used my real email address was in this group. It's possible this is just a coincidence, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least if these people were going through this forum and harvesting email addresses. It'll be interesting to see if anyone else starts getting this kind of spam for the first time. ------------------ Steve OptiBoard Discussion Forums
The education SPAMs seem to go in waves. I was receiving them well before I ever posted on aed. Usually e-mail addresses are harvested by a variety of methods from out right buying of the names to hacking, and everything in between. One security measure that is always mentioned is to hide your identity wherever possible. Another way is to corrupt your e-mail in a way that makes it easy for people reading it reply to you, but makes life rough for the various bots out there.
I strongly suspect it's a coincidence. The Palmers Green crowd would have to be *amazngly* efficient to harvest the information, get it to their Romanian spammers, and get the spam delivered, all within 12 hours. The normal lag time is 1-3 weeks, based on what I've seen from newsgroup postings.
