rtnl.org.uk/words/20020715-hugecrush_com.shtml
I just got an email with the subject Someone has a huge crush on you which I took to be spam as soon as I saw it and I very nearly deleted it. But just before I hit the delete key, the lonely yet optimistic romantic in me got the better of me and I stopped to check it out. The email begins: Dear Colin Robertson, Someone has a huge crush on you.
Theyve capitalised my name, which a lot of the people who know me personally know that I dont do. Theyve also used an email address which I havent given out to anyone for a year or so and which is now pretty much left to the spammers. So while it could be a from a real person, it would have to be from someone whos known me over a year and who hasnt yet discovered that I have a new email address. So my first assumption when Im asked to log in using my email address is that they want to verify that the address exists and is in use, thus increasing the value of the address list they sell.
Even more implausibly, Im told that this address has one crush on it. So I click through some of the clues to the identity of mazzys secret admirer and all I get is a set of very generic statements: I may already have a partner, I wish I had met you years ago, etc. And I have the option of making a guess as to who this person might be by entering their email address. Theres also an Open button, presumably for finding out the identity of this person.
Yep, this is all far too suspicious to be believable, but youve got to admire their cunning. They send out a few emails to lonely losers like myself, the more gullible of whom will visit the site and, as they make their guesses, will enter a few more email addresses of people they know. Those people will then receive emails telling them someone has a crush on them and the process will be repeated. And the email addresses they receive will all be real, in-use addresses. Unless someone is doing this as a labor of love, they must have some way of covering their costs.
The site also has a page from which you can send your own crush messages though curiously hidden, as if theyre expecting more of their visitors to be the recipients of the emails rather than the senders. So it may actually be possible that theres someone out there who does have a crush on me and has seen fit to tell me through this website rather than in person. It may even be the case that this website has actually recorded that information rather than just the email addresses involved.
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