Make Money Online Email Spam

I've been bombarded with spam emails from this fairly known entrepreneur for a couple of weeks recently. He's best known as a "make money online" digital product seller. I won't reveal his name, it wouldn't be fair if I singled him out because everyone spams using a fake name while this guy's brave enough to be (or shamelessly) open. He works in partnership with developers and releases new products every few weeks. But the products are all similar to one another and therefore inevitably, his target audience is those who are brand new, who probably have never heard his name before, and are not aware that his products are seasonal. So he and his affiliates must be doing whatever it takes to acquire new leads to promote his new releases throughout the year. 

Quantity Over Quality

Some Warrior Plus sellers keep coming up with a new "make money" product with a different name as frequently as every other week. I guess it's more profitable for them that way, considering how hard it may be to create one cornerstone product and keep it bestselling for years. I don't know, I'm just assuming - I've never sold any product myself, I'm not a creator. The quality of those products sucks (I've bought a few of those over the years) because;

• I have seen some duplicates, i.e. rehashed versions of previous releases.
• The sales pages are grossly misleading - as if the product will automatically make the users wealthy.
• Lack of support - releasing a new product bi-weekly means that each product has an extremely short lifespan. It'd be impossible for the seller to provide continuous support. 

These products are sold at a low price, typically from $17-$47 one-time fee. They're primarily targeted to new users who have yet to realize that the product is just a tool, they'll have to spend a lot of money on traffic to make it work.

Email Sold To Third Parties

When you sign up with something, unless it's sold by a reputable company, your email address is often passed on to third-party marketers, i.e. spammers. It should be prohibited by the data protection laws but in reality, a lot of individual marketers sell your email address without your consent. They do that incognito and disappear quickly, so it's difficult for the policing organizations to catch them.

Over the past couple of years, my email addresses have been erroneously sold to this particular spammer a few times. I make sure to use a "disposable" email address whenever I sign up with dodgy marketing campaigns, so that's ok by me. All I have to do is to ditch the address and create a new one periodically. It's the easiest way to deal with spam. If a product/service that I signed up with turns out to be a legit and useful one, then I'll change my address to a regular one.

But last year, this spammer somehow managed to hack my private email address - I don't know whether he actually scraped it or bought it from someone who had scraped it. No idea who, how, or from where. 

Anyway, I immediately treated his campaign emails as spam, but that would only fill up my spam folder with his twice+ daily emails. He's using his own email server rather than using an email marketing service, so you can't report it as spam, you see. I had to request to remove my address 3-4 times before his ridiculously frequent new product campaigns stopped. That was sometime last year.

Zoom Invitation Spam

All of a sudden 2 weeks ago, I've started to receive Zoom invitations from this spammer again. 4 emails in one day, all read "$1,000 per day", "Congratulations! You'll have your money in 48 hours", etc.

It means that he either dug up his unsubscribers list and picked my address from last year or mined my address via somewhere again.

The only option I could see on the invitation email is to "cancel" the meeting registration, so I cared to cancel the registration I had never authorized in the first place. 

A few hours later, I received another invitation from Zoom saying "Thank you for registering for the webinar." I canceled it again, then I received another one - "Thank you for registering..." Zoom can invite up to 1,000 participants at a time. Obviously, as soon as I de-registered my email address, he would add it back. It's crazy. 

The invitation email contained his contact address, though it was Gmail.

So I wrote to this email address, asking him to stop spamming. Twice. No response. And I'm still getting fresh Zoom "webinar" invitations daily. 

Unfortunately, Zoom is as bad, I emailed them to complain 10 days ago and I've received no reply.

Well, spam is spam, it's nuisance. I've reported both this spammer and Zoom to the Federal Trade Commission and a couple of other fraud prevention organizations. No more wasting time.