They Know Where You Live

I noticed a while ago that my home address popped up in some spam that made it past my system for filtering spam. I decided to take a moment and see how often my address showed up in spam that the filter caught.

It showed up in about 45 out of the 2432 messages sitting in my "intercepted spam" list. For those of you who went to the University of Washington, that's about 2%.

Almost all of the said messages were targeted at one thing. Refinancing my home loan. This brings up two questions:

Where did they get my personal information?

Who would trust a company that advertises via spam mail to refinance their house?

There are a few possible answers to the first question. Obviously my home ownership is on public record, but that doesn't answer how they got my email address. I have purchased things online using that address. It's entirely possible that one of those companies sold me out.

I think its also unlikely that the entity who sent me the unwanted email actually knows I own a house. Spammers tend to take a shot-gun approach to marketing. If you send a thousand emails to people including their physical addresses, a good percentage will actually be home owners. Some spammers take this to an extreme. I frequently get spam email in Korean.

As for the second question, I can only guess they're the same people who purchase roof-cleaning from telephone solicitors and spam stoppers from spammers.

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