« Hitting the Quaker Oats Lottery | Main | Now Health.com Being Joe Jobbed »

May 19, 2009

I'm posting this separate followup to my earlier article about the slew of spam claiming to come from Fairfax Digital. Based on the number of Google searches that have landed folks to my article, it's still a vexing problem.

As I suggested in my earlier piece, the emails which begin with:

Dear ,
Thank you for becoming a Fairfax Digital Member.

do not originate, nor are they connected with, the real Fairfax Digital firm in Australia. I have heard directly from a representative of the company, and I accept her word. There were too many signs behind the facade of the messages to suggest Fairfax Digital was responsible. In addition to the numerous pointers mentioned in my earlier posting, I should have also added that the corporate logo in the spam messages looks nothing like the company's current logo. Perhaps the criminal spammer is using an old hijacked design.

I know it's hard to undo a first impression. When that first impression consists of copious amounts of spam tied to a particular brand name, even thinking of that name might send the lip curling. In this case, at least, your curling would be misdirected. It's important not to take any unsolicited email message at face value. Sometimes the scam is intuitively obvious; other times it takes additional digging to get to the truth.