The Face of Spam

Anyone who spends any amount of time working or playing online knows that there's always some kind of spam lurking out there, just waiting to pounce on you. Generally, the term spam refers to unsolicited information in the form of ads, email, etc. We all know it when we see it, and wonder how on earth people who create spam still manage to attract people to their site, product or cause.

When we find a nasty little fish (or phish!) in our spam filter from "Sales Blaster" or "asdfjkl.com", we usually delete it without looking. But does anyone stop and wonder what kind of person wrote such an email? Who is the man or woman that so shamelessly invades our space with their nonsense?

Recently I had the opportunity to meet a spammer almost face to face. One of my groups received several join requests one day, four of which were from the same lensmaster. This in itself isn't unusual, so I didn't think there was a problem until I started reviewing their lenses. Each of the four pages had similar titles, and nearly identical content. All of the links pointed to the same website, and there was little to see besides a short blurb and an Amazon module.

Because my groups' guidelines specifically state that all lenses must have original written content, I had to deny these lenses from the group. It didn't help that they were barely related to the group topic as well.

When I went to the lensmaster's bio page to let them know why their lenses weren't accepted into the group, I noticed that these four lenses were the only works so far made, and the lensmaster had only been a Squidoo member for a matter of weeks. I don't remember how I worded it, but I let this person know as politely as possible in my message, that their content was spam-like and not the best use of Squidoo. I try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt...sometimes people are making honest mistakes.

I checked back in with this person's bio later, and discovered that they had added a few new lenses - all of them about credit card debt. So that was the end of that relationship. It became obvious to me that I had met a real-life spammer, and I found the experience very confusing. Here was a real person, with a photo and a bio and everything. And they were doing things that I normally associate with facelessness and codes. It's certainly possible that the photo and blurb provided were totally fake, but there's still a breathing person behind these meaningless contributions - a person who is capable of making better decisions.

I'm very glad that I know better!