Email Lists and the Shady Economy
Shady offers have have been available on the Internet almost as long as porn.
There is one thing all businessees need. More than lower taxes or less regulation. Businesses need customers. Those tech companies at the pinnacle of the Fortune 500: Google, Facebook. Most of their users don’t pay. They are rich because of advertising.
Advertising by companies who need customers.
Getting those customers is the primary motive of companies from McDonalds and Coke, to the tiny web startup. First, you need the contacts. Email may not be all the rage with the younger crowd, but is still the preferred method of business communication. You can pay $25,000 a year and more for software that will provide you with initial contacts. Contacts are the first step to sales.
We also live in an age where there is an endless supply of people, apparently sitting in front of a screen all day with not much better to do, who will do tasks for pennies. Others sell digital information, for not much more.
It was not difficult to find this wonderful offer: a 6 million business list with addressed, emails, and phone numbers for $1.
And payable in Bitcoin as well! In true “I don’t have anything much better to do” fashion, I answered some survey questions and quickly saved up my .001581 BTC and sent it off, to find out if this list is real.
After a few confirmations, courtesy of our friends at the blockchain, the order is “processing”. Check Inbox, and we’re ready to go.
Which opened up a text file giving the MediaFire links to download.
Two files and they seem to be large.
Upon opening them, it DOES seem to be a lot of email addresses. After combining the file the size is impressive, 1.2GB.
The final count? 8.1 Million businesses. Not just emails, but phone numbers and addresses. Talk about over-delivering!
I won’t be spamming these nice folks, and you shouldn’t email lists that aren’t opt-in — but I will say something for the shady economy, in this case at least, they did what they said they would do.
