Pocketables

An interesting tracing of spam

You might recall that a couple of days ago some dumbasses got into a firefight 518 feet from my sleeping daughter’s bedroom window at 2am. Basically a property crime of an insured vehicle at a used car dealership was happening, employees showed up at 2am with guns and blocked in a vehicle that was being stolen, got rammed, and then the employees shot at a 17 & 20 year old 27 times.

TL;DR – Bloggity – finally managed to trace one of these advertising trains down. Just vaguely interesting to me.

Here’s the audio of the firefight from a Nest IQ Cam I have pointing out back

Our councilperson weighing in on it here.

But that’s not the odd part… I got an email from a car dealership right next to my work saying they’d gotten the news that I was in the market for a new car two days after this. I asked them where they got this information and as with most spammers got a vague response that contained no info and the “we’ll remove you from our list rather than answer the question”.

I had looked up H&M Motorsports because 2am armed response on a property / car theft and 27 shots fired. At this point is Google’s Adsense kicked in to sell that info, and bam.. used car lots contacting me.

Now, how it went from Adsense to them connecting my email address is another step, because Google doesn’t sell that particular data. But there are plenty of ways with data brokers.

Fun with targeted advertising gone awry.

Pocketables does not accept targeted advertising, phony guest posts, paid reviews, etc. Help us keep this way with support on Patreon!
Become a patron at Patreon!

Paul E King

Paul King started with GoodAndEVO in 2011, which merged with Pocketables, and as of 2018 he's evidently the owner. He lives in Nashville, works at a film production company, is married with two kids. Facebook | Twitter | Donate | More posts by Paul | Subscribe to Paul's posts

Avatar of Paul E King