Geek Boy's blog: Who loves ya, baby?

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Who loves ya, baby?

I got an email late last week...

Precedence: bulk
To: xxxx@xxxx.edu
Subject: Someone Has Sent You a Love-O-Gram
From: LoveOGram 
Message-ID: <0MKoyl-1FIkpv38ZF-00021d@mrelay.perfora.net>
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 06:03:39 -0500

Dear Peter,

Someone has sent you a LoveOGram through LoveOGram.com!  A LoveOGram is an anonymous way to show romantic interest in someone you know. (No Kidding: Your LoveOGram sender is a real person, maybe a friend or colleague, who knows your name and email address.)

Is the feeling mutual?

The sender of this LoveOGram indicated that your name is: Peter

If this information is not correct, then please disregard this email. To find out if the person who sent you this message is someone you like, come to http://www.LoveOGram.com/recvd.html.

Good Luck!

(By the way, replying to this email won't work. You have to come to www.LoveOGram.com to play. It's completely free.)

*** LoveOGram.com - Delivering Free Love Around The World ***

The idea of someone anonymously sending me a love-o-gram is a little weird. Kinda a neat thought, in some ways, but weird. Highly unlikely to be true, though, unless it were from my wife, and she proclaims innocence. Other suspicious items:

My .edu address is publicly visible.
The site shows me an ad for student loan consolidation before showing me the love-o-gram
The site has a publicly-visible site stats bug at the bottom.

The site stats bug is the interesting item - the site load seems to spike every week or so - I'm guessing the love-o-gram is really a spam-o-gram, send out to harvested .edu addresses.

If I'm wrong, and someone did send me a love-o-gram, I don't generally respond to anonymous solicitations. Be brave enough to talk to be.

2 Comments:

At 10:52 PM, Anonymous said...: Ha! I'm also a student at Minnesota. I also recieved a LoveOGram at my edu mail address. But I very rarely give out my school email address. So something smelled funny.

I just ran a Google search on LoveOGram. Most the the hits came from websites of other college students. But you're the only one who caught the college loan advertisement (Nice job!) It definitely seems that they're phishing for email adresses.

The email presents my first name as some sort of evidence that it was sent by a real person? Whoopity-doo! That information is available in the University's public directory where they probably got my mail address.

Part of me deeply resents being toyed with. But another part of me has to admit that I admire this clever scheme.

OTOH, even lovesick folks in their early 20s seem to find this method of attempted contact childish & off-putting. Maybe they should direct their efforts to the kids on MySpace.
At 1:29 AM, Grant said...: I'm a student in Ohio, and I also got one of these a couple months back. I'd thought of a few things, mostly how such a scheme could do more harm than good. I'd never considered the idea that the whole thing was just a pathetic phishing attempt. That makes much more sense. I never saw any college loan ads, but the whole site is laden with various banners and googleAds. Maybe it's a new form of self-propagating spam?

It appears they are already going after the myspace'ers. Same gimmick, different name. Each site links to the other, how shameless.