JC Penney – Spammer
Today I got spammed by JC Penney. At first, I thought it might be a phishing scam. The link to click in the email was to jcpenneyem.com instead of jcpenney.com. When I checked the “whois” information, however, the domain jcpenneyem.com was, actually, registered to JC Penney. Instead of clicking on the provided link, which included lots of scripting code in addition to the domain, I just entered jcpenneyem.com in the browser address window. That resulted in a “Page Not Found” page. Suspicious. Then I cut and pasted the link out of the email, deleting the part with my email address (the address they used, by the way, is one of my spam addresses – it’s a very old address that has no purpose in the world except it’s on all the spam lists). And guess what — JC Penney, unless somebody went to an awful lot of trouble to duplicate the whole JC Penney website. The first page did have a section to “access your JC Penney account”, but when I investigated, it was the same page (more importantly, the same URL) as my bona fide JC Penney account page. The spammed email address, incidentally, is not the address that JC Penney has on file for my account; nor is it an address I’ve ever given them. The only way they could have that address is by acquiring one of the aforementioned spam lists.
I’m not sure how Becky is going to feel about the fact that henceforth we will never buy anything from JC Penney, but that’s my rule about spammers. I wish everybody who uses the internet had the same rule, and that this marketing decision would put JC Penney out of business. But, sadly, it seems mainstream business has now been sold on the marketing value of spam.
Sigh.
kim says:
Darn spammers. Mom is going to be pretty sad, eh? Bummer. It’s more of the corporation sell-out. Too bad.
Stephen says:
Good practice. We won’t shop at JC Penney either. Um, not that JC Penney will notice because we don’t normally go there ever. I was going to say that I don’t really recall seeing any around here, but I did a yp check and there’s actually one in the mall right near our house — not as observant as I think I am, I guess. Also, I was going to suggest boycotting subsidiaries, but unlike most big chains, it seems that JCPenney is independent & doesn’t own anything else… at least they don’t list any connections on their website. Oh well.
John says:
I sent a report about this to Rush Limbaugh. Pretty lame but I just couldn’t think where else to report to in attempt to get their spamarketing ploy publicized. If anybody else has ideas about that, feel free to pass the word. I’m kind of surprised to not have heard something about it elsewhere, actually. Is it possible the vast majority has just become so jaded about spam they expect it and figure there’s nothing they can do about it except let their ISP censor, I mean filter, their email for them?