Spam - It Knows Where You Live

Most unsolicited email that I get advertises services that could potentially appeal to large portions of the population:

On the other hand - a bunch of my spam pitches stuff that's much more "vertically" marketed. These things have potential appeal to a relatively small number of people. Still, the messages are usually delivered to people fairly indiscriminately.

As a result, they are rarely selling things that I would have interest in (if I was the kind of loser that purchased goods and services from spammers):

Over the last month I've been getting some spam that's targeted at me in the extreme.

Often the subject lines will contain my physical address: "Rich Stevensen 34231 James Street Austin, TX 21994" (no, this isn't my real contact info).

The message then continues to pitch me on refinancing my house or taking out a home equity line of credit.

My address is in the phone book, and I know my email address is out there from the other 400 pieces of junk mail that land in my spam filter program each day. But how'd the spammer put the two together? How did they know I own a house?

I remember back when I first moved into my house nearly a decade ago. To my surprise, I was greeted with dozens of different coupons in my mailbox from local businesses. They all had the theme of "welcoming me to the neighborhood." Apparently someone tipped them off to my arrival. Did the same people let the spammers know I'm a home owner?

I think it's more likely they got my physical address and email address from some company I did business with, and then sold me out. There have been hundreds of documented cases of this happening.

They also may have scrapped my information from one of the dozens of different domains I've registered over the years. As for owning a house, they had about a pretty good chance of just guessing that correctly.

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