All told I've spent around $80 on sales leads.
The Internet abounds with many of these operations that aggregate clients and contact information to sell to vendors. The vendors in turn call, e-mail or write to these potential clients to woo them with promises of beautiful days devoted to celebrating their love and the best flowers, food or photos that they could ever imagine for just the right price.
Most of that $80 has gone right down the drain.
It’s often easy to tell when spam has wormed its way into my Inbox. There are the telltale signs, the use of capital letters and about fourteen different exclamation points inserted at random into the subject line as if every other syllable needed some additional excitement.
The one downside of my recent surge in advertisement has been the trickle of spammers finding their way through Google’s filters (probably the same way they all found themselves with Gmail accounts) to get right out there in front of me. Of course it doesn't help to know that it's possible that I paid for the click that lead to the spam.
The last time I really paid any attention to a piece of spam was when I got my first notice from the Swiss National Lottery, after all who doesn’t love it when you win a lottery contest that you didn’t even enter.