Picking Indie Auto’s 1st Annual Spammer of the Year Award was challenging. In 2020 we received so many spam messages worthy of consideration. However, Eric Jones earned the crown for both the outstanding quantity and quality of his spam.
Indeed, Jones actually beat God. No, really. As you might expect, God’s submission was truly impressive. He wrote the world’s longest paragraph, replete with lots of ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. Yet for all of the wisdom He conveyed, God displayed a refreshing level of humility. At one point he wondered whether the reader might consider His message the “ravings of a lunatic.”
How could Eric Jones possibly beat God?
For starters, Jones utterly deluged Indie Auto with missives throughout the year. We got so used to seeing Jones’s greeting, “Cool website!” that we missed his encouraging words when he skipped a few days.
Just as importantly, the quality of Jones’s pitch was judged to be top notch. As a case in point, 10 months after he started spamming Indie Auto, his message continued to include, “I just found your site.”
The selection panel also thought it impressive that Jones sells a service that is obviously irrelevant to what Indie Auto does.
And, as an added bonus, Jones is apparently associated with an outfit, talkwithcustomer.com, that others have alleged to use secretive — and questionable — business practices (DomainGang, 2020). His name may not even be real.
What is Eric Jones’s very special prize?
I have no idea whether any of the allegations against Mr. Jones are true. However, even if they are not, we would still be hard-pressed to imagine a more perfect winner of our 2020 Spammer of the Year Award. Congratulations, Eric Jones!
So what do we offer as a grand prize? You may have noticed that Indie Auto is the publishing equivalent of an organ grinder’s monkey (Romano, 2020). This is why all that we can do is to play him a happy little tune. But it is a good one!
RE:SOURCES
- DomainGang; 2020. “Who is this bastard spammer “Eric” from talkwithwebvisitor.com?” domaingang.com. Posted June 15; accessed February 16, 2021.
- Romano, Evan; 2020. “Netflix’s Mank Leans Heavily on the Parable of the Organ Grinder’s Monkey.” Men’s Health. Posted Dec. 4; accessed April 22, 2021.
This clown has set a python script to run on all Contact 7 forms. Unsub link in his email only confirms the email is live. I’ve launched complaints with both the FTC and his ISP, Cloudflare. I encourage others inconvenienced but this constant barrage of nonsense to do the same. Thanks for painting a target on this clown.