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Tuesday 18 September 2012

Motor vouchers

On September 16, I got a spam "MotorVoucher", which seemed to be offering money-off deals for motorists. I say "seemed to" because I didn't investigate whether this was a scam whereby they take your money and do nothing (as is the case with most of the spam emails that I get, unless I'm wrong and there really is $2.7 million dollars waiting for me to claim it) or whether they actually did give you some sort of service. Whichever, I didn't want their email.

So I phoned them up on 0845 217 7946 and spoke to a nice man there. He told me that "Happy Tree emails" did their spamming for them, and he'd take me off their list (which means nothing, because I think it was a one-shot) and I should talk to Happy Tree for more action.

So I did. I went to the Happy Tree web site, which gives the mobile number of Kelvin Cooper, 07798 871021, and I called him on that. He was a bit surprised that I had his number, but as I explained, if you put your phone number on your web site, you shouldn't be surprised when people use it. Kelvin said that they don't buy lists, so it must be from a list they'd got some other way.

Kelvin looked into the matter, and said that he'd got my email address from "International Travel and
Health". So I googled them, and phoned them, asking for their "Compliance officer". That got me to Kate.

I explained the whole thing to Kate. She was rather annoyed. She said they used Happy Tree in the past (a year ago), and given them a list of emails to spam to for a "marketing campaign", but they shouldn't be using it now. And for selling "Motor vouchers"? Kate sounded very annoyed about this, and she's going to look into it.
And Kelvin has told me that he's going to contact "International Travel and Health" to check that I was opted in with them (I know I wasn't, because I've never used that email).

Kate also told me that they do all their spamming in-house now, becasue she's found that so many spamming companies are a bit disreputable.

Indeed.

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