What do they want with my website?

February 6, 2008 4:33 AM

In the last 24 hours I've received several messages all requesting prices to place ads on my wifes website. What's going on?

All the messages have the following format:

Good day,

My name is xxxxxx and I am contacting you to inquire eventual purchase of a link on your website (naturesbestshot.com).
Could you please give us the prices for the following ad options:

1) text link on your homepage only
2) text link on all pages
3) text box 120x60, 125x125 on homepage
4) text box 120x60, 125x125 on all pages

The reply-to addresses are all @yahoo and fit with the link/banner requests (ie hooha marketing or suchlike) but the senders address is usually somewhere in Romania and something exotic like [e-mail].

My wife has absolutely no interest in any advertising on her site but I would really like to know what all these folks are up to. What do they possibly have to gain? I have no intention of replying to them - I assume that is the correct course of action?

posted by Umhlangan to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

I'd say it's spammers trying to see if the your email address has someone reading the email sent to it. If you reply, they will know that it's worth sending spam to your address, and will proceed to do so.

Don't reply.
posted by Zarkonnen at 4:48 AM on February 6, 2008

1. Yes it's a scam.
2. They'll need "banking information" to pay you, yadda yadda yadda, your account balance shrinks, The End.
posted by beaucoupkevin at 4:48 AM on February 6, 2008

There are various scams around at the moment involving identity theft, 'accidental' overpayment, etc., and I'd assume the worst. Genuine requests usually mention specific pages that rank highly for specific topics, so they can capitalise upon your Page Rank and traffic (it's still best to avoid such deals, as the promoted sites tend to be rather spammy and Google is increasingly frowning upon selling ordinary links to manipulate rankings).
posted by malevolent at 5:28 AM on February 6, 2008

I got some as well. Spam. Delete.
posted by chillmost at 5:54 AM on February 6, 2008

Response by poster: Thanks - that reinforces exactly what we were thinking. Is it just me or does that whole "please send us your banking info so we can send you a check" seem like a lot of work for possibly very little reward?
I'm sure only one person in a million every does that and they probably have to wade through a lot of replies from people looking to get some advertising dollars to pay for their hosting.
posted by Umhlangan at 8:19 AM on February 6, 2008

You automate most of the work. You have a bot that crawls the web looking for valid sites, and sends thousands (millions?) of emails, like the one you got. There is not much reason for someone to reply unless they are falling for it so the get back a few replies, maybe 20. They agree to what ever fee you ask, cause why not? Maybe half of those agree to give them the bank info, and they drain those accounts. Say they average $1000 a sucker and 10 suckers that is $10k. Not to bad for maybe 5 to 10 hours of work, no?
posted by d4nj450n at 12:53 PM on February 6, 2008