John M. Wargo

Continuing with my current theme of writing about internet scams, another one made its way into my inbox this afternoon. Technically it's not necessarily a scam, they may actually offer the service, but it's an unsolicited email (and currently against US law, right?) that an uninitiated person would read and say 'holy crikey, I'd better send this in...'

The subject of the email was: "Domain Notification: JOHN WARGO This is your Final Notice of Domain Listing" - something that will make its reader think that they've missed some sort of deadline and are about to lose something. If you look at the email (that's the entire email body shown below) they certainly made a big effort to make it look professional and authoritative. If you printed it, it would look just like a business form, lending it even more credibility. When you start to read it, it's clear that it's a soliciation, but I'm not sure many people would read it. It's deliberately designed to deceive the reader but they're doing it, so it must be having some sort of success.

For the record, soccerrefs.org is a site I've owned for it seems like forever. I built a Domino-based referee schedule management system and had it running for many years on this site. Even through I'm long retired as a Soccer Official, I recently setup a Soccer Referee forum on the site using phpbb, an open source bulletin board system. As soon as I get some time, I'm going to probably move it to vBulletin and do some advertising to generate some traffic and see what I can make with it.