From: Kathleen Myers
Subject: [censored] ranked #1 for [censored too]…
This is in regards to [MY EMPLOYER]

I’m in the early phases of creating a new informational website about [OUR BUSINESS] and other related phrases. We’re building this site to serve as the ultimate resource for information about this topic. It’ll have a minimum of 40 pages of relevant, informative, high quality content. Due to the high quality of the content, our sites often rank naturally high for specific, related phrases. Based on your industry, we predict this site will start receiving 2,000 hits per month within 3 to 6 months, and eventually build up to the point where its getting anywhere from 5,000 to 20,000 visitors per month within the first 6 to 12 months.

We’re looking for a company like yours to recommend to all of our search engine visitors. Many people who visit our information sites want to buy your products and services, but we do not sell anything… we just provide information. When someone wants to buy something, we will just send them to your site.I’m in discussions with a few others who have some interest in taking this traffic. We want to make sure that whichever company we recommend to our visitors is a reputable company, but after looking at [SITEURL], it looks like you’re doing pretty well so I doubt there would be any problem with sending you the traffic. I have to make a final decision this week as to which company we will end up recommending to our visitors, so please let me know ASAP if you’re interested.

(The best way to reach me is by calling 888-521-6702… leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible - usually the same day.)… or you can just reply to me and leave me your phone # and I’ll call you back as soon as I can.)Thanks!

Kathleen
Kathleen Myers
Traffic Conversion
http://www.trafficconversions.com
Email: kathleen@trafficconversions.com
Phone: 888-521-6702
International: (011) 310-495-0765

What’s intriguing, is that it was easily able to fool spamassassin. The site, trafficconversions has no pagerank on google, and no listed backlinks either. Furthermore, a quick whois search reveals that the domain was registered in Dec. last year, despite the © notice in your footer advertising that content is copyrighted 1999 - 2003. Deeper digging reveals that they may or may not be affiliated with racsystem, highindex, or keywordconversions, who seem to partake in this type of email campaigning as well. Highindex does have a 6/10 google pr, however, so if they’re affiliated with them, that makes me wonder why they gave up using that domain as a contact point, in favor of one that makes them appear to be blacklisted by google (or at best, just very inneffective at promoting your own site with google). Perhaps because google searched for “highindex+spam” already reveal too much about this company, heh. The game ends when it becomes apparent that 211.99.218.7 is registered to Hengmei advertise Inc. in China. They were smart enough to at least relay through your own server rather than use an open proxy in china, so spam-filter checks to the smtp address vs. the reply-to will come up clean.

Initially i thought i had some pretty creative spammers on my hands. After a few minutes of searching, it’s apparent these guys don’t really know anything more than the average spammer, except how to write a letter that looks more hand written… their site still has no real “content".. just keyword jargon crap, the number in the email is 310 (LA), the number on the whois is 206 (Seattle), the address on their whois is in Ohio, and finally the IP is owned by a chinese company.. no big suprises there. Mostly i’m just posting this with the hope that it gets indexed by some big search engines so that other people who receieve emails from these spammers and type in “trafficconversions” can get some facts.