This interesting little tidbit landed in our inbox just moments ago: Borders sold all of their customer data to Barnes and Noble, including information about your DVD and other video purchases! And, clearly, your associated email address! Or, another way to look at it is that Barnes and Noble purchased your customer data from Borders. And promptly added you to a mailing list without your consent to use your personal data from Borders, which they *also* obtained without your consent. Either way you look at it, neither of them come up smelling like roses.

Did you get spam from Jerry Miller of First Working Capital Group? The spam may have come from “JM.FWC@ymail.com” or “JMillerFWC@email.com”, or maybe even another email address, and with a subject of “Please Review” or “Proposal Attached”, but the rest of the content is the same. It starts out “If your company finds itself short of cash and unable to secure working capital from traditional lenders, we can help,” and goes on from there. Interestingly, Mr. Miller (if he indeed exists) is not the only one responsible for this spam – under CAN-SPAM, First Working Capital Group is as responsible for spam sent out on their behalf. So register your displeasure by contacting them at their whois contact address (it’s only fair, after all), at jeff@internetsalesresults.com.

Twitter has been the vector for a flood of work-from-home scam spams this week, as followers of hacked accounts found dozens of copies of the “I snagged $217 in just a few hours online. learned how to do it from {link to scam}” type of spam coming at them via direct message. The link goes to a faked NBC article that touts “How did this stay at home mom make $13900+/Month.. We Investigate..” and that cleverly makes note of the geographic location (geolocation) of your IP address and customizes the article to make it seem as if the single mom is from your own town.

“OMG! Its unbeliveable now you can get to know who views your facebook.”. Did someone post that on your Facebook wall? If so, whatever you do, don’t click the link that says “CLICK 2 SEE YOUR STALKERS”!! Yes, it’s just another in a round of Facebook virus spams.

Nicole Santos is getting quite a name for herself, and deservedly so. Her name has been spammed all across Facebook, in wall posts that are full of profanities, and also almost always exhort the spammed to “Vote for Nicole Santos”. The trick, of course, is that at the bottom of the post, next to the “Comment” and “See Friendship” links, is a link to “Remove this app”. Because the language in the wall posts is so foul, one’s first instinct is to hit that link as quickly as possible – but don’t click that link because that is how the virus infects your machine. (There is also a similar virus spam going around Facebook right now that exhorts you to “Please do your part in PREVENTING SPAM by VERIFYING YOUR ACCOUNT. Click VERIFY MY ACCOUNT right next to comment below to begin the verification process”.)

Here are two things that you should never do to your Facebook friends: create a Facebook group and add them to it without asking, or tag them in one of your photos unless you have a really good reason to. Why should you never do these two things? Because it can cause your Facebook friends to have their inboxes overridden with completely irrelevant Facebook notifications that they don’t want. What sort of friend would do that to their friends?

Spam is one of those “I know it when I see it” sorts of things. Most of us can agree on things that are definitely spam (such as “herbal enhancement” and “make money fast” email), and things that definitely are not spam (an email from mom saying she’s sending cookies, or from your boss giving you a bonus). But it’s that big grey area in the middle where people don’t necessarily agree: one man’s spam is another man’s “Hey, that’s useful.” Please answer the following quick questions to help us determine how *you* view spam, and what is spam, and what isn’t.

Over the course of the past week, we have received four – count ’em – 4 online greeting cards. We’ve been cautioning against the evils of the online greeting card industry industry for years, but apparently it’s time to do it again.

There are reports of a huge increase in the amount of Japanese spam following the massive 9.0 earthquake, the aftershocks, and the tsunamis that battered Japan over the past weekend. There are several theories as to why the marked increase in spam from Japanese addresses and servers, ranging from “all hell breaking out” to “spammers, like cockroaches, can survive anything.”

Today saw a new spam run – a bizarre spam run with a single line, and a non-working link to “Career Trends”. Every version has just one line, explaining how the sender has earned some amount of money – usually a few hundred dollars – using “Career Trends”. The link to Career Trends is always a non-working link to targets like “x-msg://513/”

With the new “Do you owe over $10,000 to the IRS?” SMS text message spam making the rounds (ours came from 857-205-2199) we thought it would be a good time to remind you that cell phone spam (including SMS spam) is illegal, and there is a way to report it.

If you have suddenly found yourself receiving oodles of spam as a “member” of a Google group for which you never signed up, well, you’re not alone. This tactic, while not new, seems to be experiencing a resurgence, as newly minted spammers discover that you can force-subscribe someone to a Google group, and all posts to any Google groups to which they have been subscribed will end up in their email inbox. A perfect example of this Google Groups abuse is the Google group “All About Ads”, which appears to have been created by spammer Jyotish Khanna, and which can be found at
http://groups.google.com/group/all-about-ads and, of course, in the inbox of unsuspecting targets.

Two massive spam runs were unleashed on the Internet today, and odds are very good that you will receive at least one of the two. Either you will be offered the opportunity to “Buy Cheap Watches (Rado,Rolex) and other products!”, or you will be told that you have received an “Electronic Federal Tax Payment System Notification number” (with some number appended at the end). Or, perhaps you’ll be extra-popular and receive both spams.

In an interesting turn of events – especially considering all of the antitrust hot water in which Microsoft has found itself in the past with the Federal government – Google is suing the Federal government for requiring that any vendor proposals in response to a Request for Quotation (RFQ – similar to an RFP, or Request for Proposal) by the Feds to create a new, unified online messaging system, must include the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite.

Sometimes I get a spam (in this case a chain letter email) that just makes me say “WTF?” So it was with this chain email that I received not once, but twice from the same sender, with the intriguing subject of “a way we can help the Gulf — please please please read!!”. The basic idea is that if we all focus our energy on envisioning the Gulf being healed, we can make it happen. Now, I’ve read The Secret, and I believe in the power of positive thinking and the law of attraction as much as the next guy (make of that what you will). But the whole “focusing your human sexual response mechanism” on the problem propels this into a whole new realm. By the way, the email also spams the URL http://tinyurl.com/come2gether, which resolves to http://letsdoandsaywedid.blogspot.com, and which features “A Call to Sacrificial Duty”. Interesting.