for months now i keep getting weird messages from a zillion different random businesses i never signed up for, and it has been driving me nuts.
Started with a few businesses all concentrated on the East Coast, and at one point even somehow signed up for a fuckin' Foot Locker rewards program ... which I promptly reset the password for and requested deletion, hoping to make it stop.
It did not. In fact at some point after that, the spam problem exploded, and now it's all over the world, though mostly the US, Canada, and Europe. And because they're mostly all apparently legitimate businesses, they go straight to my inbox instead of spam. It's been driving me nuts for ages, to the point I actually signed up for Fastmail and bought a domain of my own, and have been slowly moving most stuff over where I could.
I couldn't figure it out why they were doing it though for quite a long while. I thought maybe I'd pissed the Foot Locker dude off or something, until one of the auto-responses actually copied the text back from the response form and I figured it out: it's a crypto wallet scammer. Someone has written a bot that goes around the internet finding open contact and sign-up forms, and giving them a fake name and an email, and a link that goes to some kind of bitcoin skimmer. Why they'd use an email they don't control, I'm not sure, but given the link is there to do all the work, I'd imagine it doesn't really matter to the con. Maybe it being a legit Gmail account makes it easier to get past any spam protection.
But the thing is, they've been doing this for so long now, that apparently my email has somehow flagged some other honeypot online somewhere, because now in my spam folder I'm suddenly getting wallet scam mails actually addressed to me, or at least to my email.
I've literally at second-order crypto scamming in my fucking Gmail now, and there doesn't seem to be a goddamn thing I can do about it besides close the fucking account for good.
