Phone spam that I asked for (sort of...)

I'm a home owner, and when I juggled the numbers recently, things pointed towards it being time to refinance.

I've had this in the back of my head for a while. When browsing a popular auction site, I was presented with an advertisement offering such services. I did something I almost never do with such ads - I actually clicked it.

I'm not going to name the site specifically. Let's just say they offered to, "lower my bills." Their parent company is known for offering credit services and has a name that starts with an E followed by an X.

I somehow came to believe that I would be receiving several quotes in response to the data I provided. I went ahead and provided them with some basic information about what I was looking to accomplish.

I didn't do anything silly like give them my social security number. They may not have been able to do an actual credit-check, but they still would've had enough data to give good faith estimates on the assumption my credit was in the shape I claimed it to be.

I filled out the forms around 1am. The phone started ringing just after 8am the next day.

By evening I had five messages on my answering machine and an equal number of email messages. No one had information for me about rates. They all just wanted to talk to me about my needs.

One email specifically asked for my social security number. Was I supposed to just click "reply" and then send them my holiest of holy numbers unencrypted over the internet?

In the end - the website didn't benefit me at all. I had become a possible "sales lead" and subject to a barrage of unwanted phone calls and spam.

My new concern is who else the website in question might share my data with. Did I just sign up for yet another mortgage spam mailing list? Fortunately, I did employ one little spam fighting trick to circumvent this.

My primary mail domain is setup to accept wildcard email addresses. I simply filled out the forms with yourlamewebsite@mydomain.com. If yourlamewebsite@mydomain.com starts getting spam, I can just add the address to my antispam software as one that should be stopped. I also will know exactly who pimped out my email address.

What's the lesson? Think twice before spending your time with sites offering to find you the best lender. Perhaps other similar sites are more useful, but I'm now a bit skeptical of all of them.

After the fact I did a little research using my favorite search engine. I found a site that lists current mortgage rate averages. I then compared those numbers, with what my existing mortgage company says they can do. Turns out they're actually quite competitive. If I had just resisted the urge to click that damn dancing monkey, I probably could've saved a bunch of time.

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