Comment Altering last name for verification (Score 1) 203
Hello all, me and my friends use the following technique all the time to see exactly who is selling our names and addresses: if your name is 'John Pasquale', change it to 'John Padquale' in one of your outbound pieces of mail if you don't mind doing it, being sure to note who it was sent to. If you get a piece of spam with 'John Padquale' on it, you can almost be positive it was that entity you first sent the bogus last name to who's the name-selling culprit. Create further variations, such as 'Packquale' and 'Pazquale' and send the names off to more companies you suspect of selling your address and compile a hierarchal tree of junk mail and its dependencies based on time of receipt to see exactly who's selling what to whom. (For example, if you get one Pazquale one week, and five more the week after that, it's a sure bet the first company with Pazquale did the dirty deed. What you do after all of this is up to you... --fr0ntman