Consumer Alert: Chain Letters

Consumer Alert
Those Pesty Chain Letters

This advisory was just received from a friend.

“Hi!

Here's a nice little tidbit of information that came my way this morning. This is why I plan to neither forward or reply to any more chain-letters; you know, those that say something like, "If I don't get this back I'll ..." or "See how many flowers you can get back," or the classic, "Forward this to 10 people in the next 5 minutes or something bad will happen to you," etc.

1) Any time you see an e-mail that says, "Forward this on to '10' of your friends," or "Sign this petition," or "You'll get bad luck, (or good luck)," or whatever, it may have an e-mail tracker program attached that tracks the cookies and e-mails of the folks you forward it to.

I'm told that the host sender may be getting a copy each time it gets forwarded and thereby harvest lists of 'active' e-mail addresses for use in sending spam, or to sell to other spammers.

2) Ditto almost all e-mails that ask you to add your name and then to forward to others. They're similar to that mass e-mailing some years ago that asked people to send business cards to the little kid in Florida who wanted to break the record in the Guinness Book of Records for owner of the most business cards.

All this type of e-mail is, is a way to get names and 'cookie-tracked' personal information for telemarketers, and spammers to validate active e-mail accounts for their own profitable purposes.

You can do your friends and family members a GREAT favor by sending this notice to them; you'll be providing a service to your friends, and they'll be thankful not getting so many pesty spam e-mails in the future!

If you've been forwarding any chain-letter e-mails, it could be why you get so much spam!

Do yourself a favor and STOP adding your name(s) to these types of listings regardless how inviting they might sound! You may think you are supporting a GREAT cause, but you are NOT in the long run. Instead, you may begin to get tons of junk mail! Plus, you are helping the spammers get rich! Let's don't make it easy for them!

Also, I am advised that e-mail petitions are NOT acceptable to Congress or most other organizations. To be acceptable, most formal petitions must have a signed signature and the full address of the person signing the petition.” --

See advisory from Snopes.com at: http://www.snopes.com/luck/chain.asp

Send this letter to those well-meaning
relatives who like to send you chain letters.