Jerks and spammers, swines and scammers

Let’s look at a swinish virus then segue into swinish tendencies by certain marketers. Hard to fathom, I know. I am very happy the Swine flu didn’t become a global pandemic. But I didn’t really think it would. Just so much hype. Another case of the media “crying wolf.” And losing a bit more of its rapidly disintegrating credibility. What happens if/when there is a global pandemic or something? Will anyone believe it before it is too late? Here in the U.S. we saw a barrage of news reports, daily, almost hourly, at the local, state and national level. Were these designed to inform or just scare? If the latter, it guaranteed a steady steam of viewers at least until the crisis had passed. Here everything on the news is scary. Don’t eat that. Don’t go there. Don’t buy this. Don’t do that. Don’t fly. Don’t drive. Don’t breathe. But don’t die either.

But for certain roguish marketers, global pandemic scares = money-making opportunities. The entrepreneurial spirit continues to thrive here in America. Not just vaccine producers saw a goldmine in the recent Swine flu hysteria. It didn't take scammers long to latch on to the latest hot-button topic to try to make a quick buck. Scams built on fears of Swine flu spread like, well, a highly contagious virus, across the Internet. The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team issued an alert warning of a number of e-mail scams related to the Swine flu. The attacks arrive via an unsolicited e-mail message typically containing a subject line related to the Swine flu. Dozens of new Swine flu domain names were registered in the days following the media scare. The Federal Trade Commission and Food & Drug Administration sent out alerts about bogus products related to this “killer flu.”

Read entire article