JustClickTo.com Apple Product Text SPAM

I downloaded the Bump app for iPhone. Inside the Bump app I added my name, phone number and email address. 20 minutes later I receive a spam text message.

The spam text came from:
1-317-560-2245

Here’s the text message:

You have been selected to receive a FREE Apple Product. Just go to www.justclickto.com within 48 hours to claim your reward.

Obviously, this interests me because I have an Apple blog! If the spam text said I could get a free Windows Phone… Well, I would have deleted the message and done nothing. But it said “Free Apple Product“ How could I possibly let that go? I couldn’t. (Even though I KNOW this is a scam, I had to investigate.)

Beware: This is gonna get geeky.

The rest of this post will cover a bunch of different topics: Direct marketing, user data & privacy, nerdy webmaster/programmer techniques, sleazy bidding websites and affiliate marketing. If none of those topics interest you, then you should probably read something else. Something like, how to manage birthdays in iCal.

And away we go…

Where did the spam come from?

There are two possible scenarios:

1. The timing of spam text was a coincidence – sent by a different company… It would have arrived at 1:05pm whether or not I installed a new app on my iPhone.
2. The spam text was somehow connected to Bump. Maybe Bump sold my phone number to a sleazy, spammy company who sent the text message.

Coincidence?

I went to Twitter to find out more. I asked the Bump twitter account @bumptech if they sell users information:

Ok, that’s good to hear.

More good news : In this video, a Bump co-founder claims they have not yet implemented any strategy to make money yet. He said the company has accepted millions of dollars from investors.

I guess that settles the issue. Or does it? Let’s explore…

Selling Info?

Bump is a unique app because its purpose is to share *correct* contact information with other people. That means it’s highly unlikely users would enter fake email address or bogus phone numbers. The vast majority of the information should be correct.

Did you know Bump has over 75 million users? That’s a lot of confirmed email addresses and phone numbers.

If you’ve done any direct mail, email marketing or telemarketing, you know that good data, *verified* data, is extremely valuable… And I bet there are direct marketing companies begging to get their hands on Bump’s data.

I believe Bump

I accept Bump’s statement (via Twitter) that they are not selling phone numbers & email addresses. Coincidences happen to everyone, every day and I believe this was a coincidence… Unless other people get spam texts immediately following install of the Bump iPhone app. Then I’ll have to change my view on this topic.

Here’s What Really Happened

Somehow, my phone number fell into the wrong hands. And I got a spam text message. No big deal, right? We all get spam… Well, there’s more to the story.

The text was sent to me by an Affiliate Marketer. You’re probably asking what an affiliate marketer is. You get more info from Wikipeda here. The short definition is this: This guy sent me a text message so I’d visit the website. The tricky part is, the website redirects to a different, sleazy auction website.

Why send you to an auction site?

If you sign up at the auction site, they pay the affiliate marketer a commission. It’s a complicated way to do things, but I’m sure it’s working. After all, who doesn’t want to get a “free Apple product?”

Getting Nerdy With It

Congratulations for making it this far through the post. Now, we’re going to take the nerdyness up a notch…

Exhibit A : JustClickTo.com is blocked by robots.txt

First, the site JustClickTo.com is completely invisible to search engines like Google and Bing. If you type “JustClickTo.com” into Google, the actual site doesn’t appear. Instead, you’ll see a list of other websites talking about JustClickTo.com. And none of it is good – lot’s of scam details about the site.

Don’t you think it’s odd a person would intentionally block his site from Google?

How can you block a website from Google?

It’s very easy. If you have a website, you just create a file called robots.txt and upload it. In that file you can write commands that will tell Google and other search engines to avoid the site.

Exhibit B : The affiliate tracking link

The JustClickTo.com site uses a meta refresh redirect to send you to the auction website… What the hell does that mean?

When you go to JustClickTo.com, you’re immediately sent/redirected to the auction website. Look in the Address Bar of Safari (I’m assuming you’re using Safari on an Apple product). The address bar is circled in the image below – this is where you’ll see the switch happen. First it will show JustClickTo.com, then switch the auction website.

If you’re really interested, it’s possible to grab this spammer’s affiliate ID from the redirect link. The affiliate ID is like a fingerprint for the affiliate marketer. Find that ID, and you can potentially find out who the spammer is… Or better yet, if the text messages continue, you can complain about the spam tactics to someone at the sleazy auction website.

Affiliate Marketing Isn’t Bad

The truth is, affiliate marketing can be used for good or for evil. Typically, an affiliate link is placed on a website, like a blog, in a review of a product. In fact, I use affiliate marketing links and redirects on this blog – when we review software or iOS apps.

For example, Lito wrote a review of the Biography app for iPad. In the review, you’ll see this sentence:

Take Biography – A Journey With History’s Most Influential People, an iPad app from MAMN84, for instance.

The link in that sentence goes to this page:

http://appleslut.com/links/biography.php

The above page doesn’t actually exist. It’s a redirect that takes you to the App Store to download the app. What you don’t see is my affiliate link that’s used to send you to the app store, and apply the commission to me – if you buy the app.

Unfortunately for me, the commission is small (around 5%) and apps are cheap! If you download the $5 Biography app, I’ll get pad a whopping 25 cents. As you can imagine, I won’t be quitting my day job anytime soon.

Auction Websites Suck

I tried using one of the auction websites a while back. Why? Because I had to see how the scam worked. This is what happened…

I opened an account and prepaid about $30. With that money in my account, I started bidding on – you guessed it – an iPad. Surprisingly, I didn’t win anything and blew all of my money.

Each product has a timer that counts from 20 seconds down to zero. During the twenty seconds, anyone can click the “bid” button. Bidding costs you 20-60 cents depending on the auction site you’re using.

When a bid is placed on a product, the purchase price is increased by a penny. For example, if I am the only bidder on an iPad, the cost to by the iPad might be 1 cent. Every time a person bids on a product, the timer is reset to the full 20 seconds and counts down again.

If the timer reaches zero with only 1 bid, you can then buy the iPad for 1 cent. (on top of the 60 cents for your bid.)

Seems harmless right?

Well, it’s not. What they don’t tell you – at least, they don’t make it easy to find – is they recommend “bidding on a product you plan to buy anyway.” That way you don’t get totally screwed by spending $100 on bids for an iPad, losing the auction, and getting nothing.

Instead, the auction websites will “credit” the amount you spend on bids towards the purchase of the product. Which you can buy at full price from the website.

Sounds reasonable right?

Well, it’s not. Most of the time, the full price is MORE than the retail price. The iPad I tried to bid on was a $599 model, but the “full price” according to the auction site was $699 – a full $100 more than the price at Apple.com or any other electronics retailer.

Too Good To Be True

The moral of this story… er… post is, if it sounds too good to be true, IT IS. Don’t get fooled by the auction websites and don’t believe crappy spam text messages.

How to Stop Spam Text Messages

I don’t know exactly how to stop spam text messages. But there is one place to start: The National Do Not Call Registry which is managed by the FTC. Registering your phone number should stop telemarketing calls, but I can’t find anything about texts. Hopefully, someone will find this post and leave a comment on how we can stop spam texts.