Recently, I've had a couple of messages saying "tell me more about these jobs you're offering" (plus one that said "Don't send me any more of your crap"). I mailed one of the senders to ask why he'd mailed me and he was kind enough to write back and explain that he'd received a message from one 'Emily Moss', offering jobs at spamnation.info.

If you read no further, please read this: there are no jobs at spamnation.info, and there never will be. Also, any mail that mentions spamnation.info in the 'From:' line is fake. Got that? Good.

I'd assumed that sooner or later spamnation.info would get picked up by a spammer to use for From-line forgeries, and that I could also expect to see some joe-jobs aimed at the site. I hadn't expected anything to happen quite so fast, though: the site has only been up about a month. As Blue Security said before the hammer came down, "Great. We must be having an effect."

I haven't seen any of the spams in question yet, so I don't know any more about them. The decision to send out fake job offers is an interesting one, though. My first reaction was to wonder if the sender isn't someone who's already in the fake job business, such as this fake check fraudster, so that this type of spam comes naturally to them. They might not even have to change their templates.

It looks as if I may have been right. It appears that 'Emily Moss' is a name used in some of their spams. I won't know for certain until I see a sample spam, but the use of that name is certainly suggestive.

They might have reason to be annoyed. Google reports that my page about one of the fronts for their scam, Drop & Gain Int'l ranks high in the result list for searches on the company name, which is exactly what I want to have happen. One of the main goals of this site is to try to warn people off such scams, so if potential marks see my page and then don't fall for the scam, that's all to the good.

It's too soon to start shouting 'Victory', though. The fact that at least two people who received the spam came here, looked at the site and then mailed me to ask for a job anyway suggests that human gullibility runs deep. Only a small percentage of those who are about to get taken by Drop & Gain (you drop, they gain) will probably be smart enough to Google them first and not all of those are likely to see my page and follow the links. The con artists still have the edge.