I got this unsolicited email two days ago from someone purportedly from U.S. News and World Report, asking if I would post some links to their site. The links provided appear to be legit and the message headers do, too. The one thing that looks out of place is the date of the domain registration for usnewsmoney.com, which is a recent May 2017.
The link the email goes to a post of a Mitt Romney story in Rolling Stone to which I added exactly zero of my own commentary. Hardly anything that would “really stand out!” So, it appears a keyword search found the word debt in my post (or title) and that’s why this post was chosen.
Ashley McNamara does not appear in other Internet searches, nor on LinkedIn as far as I can tell. Oh, and there was never any “email sent a few weeks ago.” There never is.
I checked my webserver logs back to the start of the month and the only thing that’s touched that link since Christmas are bots: mostly Google, but ones called Semrush (www.semrush.com), BLEXbot (webmeup-crawler.com), CommonCrawl (commoncrawl.org), and AwarioRssBot (awario.com), too.
Guessing this email came from a bot of some sort but I’m not sure of the endgame. What do y’all think? What’s the hustle here?
Hi Mark,
I wanted to follow up with you about an email I had sent a few weeks ago, did you get a chance to review it? It’s attached below just in case you needed it again. Let me know if you have any questions!
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