On Wednesday, October 27, 2004, 12:16:24 AM, Justin Mason wrote: > http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,118164,pg,1,RSS,RSS,00.asp
> 'In an effort to understand the sordid world of mortgage spam, I > responded to several of the many such messages that flood my inbox. I > discovered that clicking and responding to these messages led to > callbacks from well-known lenders like Ameriquest and Quicken Loans > (formerly owned by Intuit, but now a separate firm), as well as dozens > of smaller legitimate companies. > What's more, most of these reputable firms had no idea they were tied to > this growing influx of mortgage spam. When I followed the spam trail, I > found the tracks sometimes led to legitimate lenders.' > --j. They're probably third party or affiliate referrals. Presumably the referrers get some kind of finder's fee (i.e. money) for bringing the prospective business in. The actual lenders probably don't even know they have scumbags feeding them leads. What should happen is that the lenders should get informed about their referrers being bad so they can stop payments to them. Reminding the lenders that most of the spammers are committing felonies in sending their spam will probably do the trick. Few legitimate companies want to be associated with crime or criminals. The article seems to confirm this and goes into some detail about the response of some different lenders. Quicken Loans fired the two spam-using lead generators they found out about, which is at least somewhat good. The author of the article did pretty good investigations. Jeff C. -- Jeff Chan mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.surbl.org/
