Spammers have no shame it seems. I just got the following email from a spammer:
From: Michael Stopleganger
Subject: [news] please pass this on....This is a letter that is being passed around to help a little girl by the name of Kristen Stopleganger. She has cancer that we thought had been 100% removed but it has come back and we don’t have the money to pay for any more opperations. So what we did was setup this website that if you just click the link then we make 3 cents. That is all that you have to do. You can do this up to once a day and we make 3 cents for every person that clicks it per day. Any help is GREATLY appreciated. My lilttle sis needs all the help she can get. Thanks!
Following the above were two links that were obscured using the TinyURL service. My first thought was to check Snopes.com to see if it was one of those “help this poor kid” emails that are either fake or the kid hasn’t needed help in ten years kind of mailings, but Snopes didn’t have anything about it so I clicked the link to see where it went. It takes you to an online dating website called AbsoluteAgency Dating Service and plops you down on their registration page. I’m not going to link to the site because I don’t want to contribute to their page rank, but it looks like a pretty piss-poor operation that is less interested in providing a service than in squeezing money out of you any way they can. In addition to their “dating service”, for example, they also provide helpful links to “Live sex cams”, “Playboy girls”, and “Russian girls.” The ad copy on their front page of the site is hilariously bad:
You are an all-sufficient person. You succeed in business, have a good career, lead a full and active life. But sometimes you feel that you are missing a friend, a soulmate, a love of your life or just a date to be ABSOLUTELY happy…
Then welcome to the world of “ABSOLUTE”!!! It’s not absolutely free, but isn’t a perfect match a sufficient prize for this? Thousands of singles worldwide are waiting for you.
Don’t hesitate! Join us! Be happy!
Your Absoluteagency
These guys should get a good bitch slapping for trying to use an email sob story of a little girl with cancer to get people to visit their website. Who the hell are they trying to target with spam like that? The people most likely to be sympathetic to the plight of a young girl with cancer are also the ones most likely to be pissed off when they find out they’ve had their chain yanked. Asshole doesn’t begin to describe these people.
Posted on 09/30/2007 at 12:34 AM 
The way I’ve always understood this is that such somewhat disreputable or small websites basically outsource their advertising to some company or computer kiddies who then do everything from hijacking computer zombies to such dirty tricks to get traffic moving ther way. Of course the quality of such traffic is shite (i.e. the click-through rates must be even worse than anything else, because the wide majority of people WILL reliase they have been duped), which only shows that people (website ownersin this case) are stupid in many cases… quantity above quality.