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Muzzling Grandad — 15 Comments

  1. I assume the mail was automatically generated with the programme simply filling in the relevant details?

    I was surprised at you using American slang, though – in England he was known as Elton Bog, presumably the corresponding name in Ireland would be Elton Jacks?

     

    • Harvard Business School Associate Professor Ben Edelman is the chap behind the email. Looked at several instances where he got it dead wrong. And he has again with this place.

      At the time this article was published he was running 150 computers 24 hours a day at 80 sites in nine countries. As he generates massive income, I suspect that number has risen over the past two years.

      So you're perfectly correct, what Granddad received was automatically generated with the program simply filling in the relevant details.

      In due course a human will check up on it to see if there's any money to be made. That could take a while, because he's known to be a tightwad, so he'll keep his overheads as low as possible.

      That means it'll probably be a $2.50 an hour previously redundant legal assistant in Jamaica, aged 52 and divorced, but with two grown children who married, presented her with oh so many grandchildren and still live in the family home, unemployed. In short she had to work, even if it's for a predatory arse. She gets a cut if she bags a half decent case to follow up on.

      In the meantime Granddad will probably get several follow up emails – and the last thing he does is reply to one, nor in any way give the slightest impression of guilt.

      Naturally they'll be following up on everything the GD writes and of course they'll have the emails of each and every commentator. They probably did so beforehand, so no need to worry, the web's full of robots doing very similar things.

      Anyway, read and enjoy:

      http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-02-14/harvard-professor-attacking-google-thrives-as-web-sheriff 

      • The only thing that would puzzle me is where they got the email address.  They can find the articles very easily just by doing a search for names, but my email address is in image format and not text to deliberately thwart automated scraping.

        Commenters' email addresses don't appear anywhere on the public site.  They are in the database which is about as secure as I can make it, so they are all inaccessible and private.

        Incidentally, that was only an extract or two from their mail.  You should see the whole fucking thing!

        And if hey are hoping to make a fortune out of me……  Hah!  I don't have any!

         

  2. Heh! That's lovely! Thanks to that injunction, I can see that this is a story that's going to run and run. You had it absolutely right in your original post, GD. If they'd just turned the other cheek, it would have been a one day story which would be long forgotten by now. What a couple of twerps. And now they're threatening an Irish blogger. Jeez, you'd think they'd have better things to do with all that money.

    • Personally I had already forgotten about it until they raked up the shit again.  I have a short memory span, but threatening letters have a habit of lengthening it.

    • Bully Beef is a brilliant name for mail like that.  You may have started a new Interweb trend?

  3. God, you're brave, Grandad!  If I'd got an e-mail with all that tripe for an introduction, with a "click here to find out more" type of link, I'd have immediately assumed it was some vile virus – particularly with that one which has been doing the rounds supposedly containing a summons for a court appearance, which actually does contain a very nasty virus – and deleted it without even bothering to look at it!

    • But I open all my mail, and especially the attachments.  I got two today [coincidentally on the same theme as above] –

      You have six (6) days to file the answer to the attached complaint and send the original copy of it to the judge until June 2nd, 2016.
      All the documents on your case are attached to this e-mail.

      Of course I opened the attachment as I like to see what type of virus they're using.  It was a JavaScript file as I expected.  I'll send you a copy if you like, though it would fuck up your computer.  Unless of course you're using Linux like wot I am which isn't quite so vulnerable! 😈

  4. WOW, you are a very bad granddad. I suspect we shall be seeing more of this sort of shit in the future. We live in strange times after all. I'd be inclined to ignore all the crap from the 'Sheriff'. The bots will turn up loads of 'transgressing' sites. Only a fraction will be followed up. And at the end of it all is money. Extortion is a dirty word and is generally 50 pages long.    

    • I spent last night sitting on the naughty step so I consider my sins absolved.  As for suing me, I have about €3 in loose change if that's any good to them?

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