50 Years of Text Games on “Violet” and Inform 7
— a delightful game about procrastination with a unique narrator, enabled by an equally unique authoring tool #Bloomberg goes looking for Tether’s billions
— searching for the not-so-stablecoin’s reserves inexplicably leads to a Mighty Ducks child actor and the co-creator of Inspector Gadget #Song Exploder on John Lennon’s “God”
— the first posthumous episode, made with the help of the Lennon estate using unreleased interviews and demos #Reuters investigation into how AT&T helped build alt-right news network OANN
— 90% of their revenue came from a contract with AT&T-owned TV platforms, including DirecTV #Entirety of Twitch leaks to 4chan
— source code repos, creator payouts, encrypted passwords, mobile/console/desktop apps, and internal/unreleased tools #Who Is the Bad Art Friend?
— a wild ride about an author who gave a kidney, another author who drew inspiration from it, and the ensuing legal drama #An anonymous former Treehouse employee on the company’s mass layoffs
— this doesn’t paint a pretty picture of leadership under Ryan Carson, the online coding school’s founder/CEO #Pitchfork revisits 19 album review scores they’d change “if they could”
— not sure what’s preventing them from amending their original snarky takedowns, but it’s a nice thought exercise #Gimlet’s Heavyweight goes Spotify-exclusive
— is it even a podcast if I can’t listen to it in my podcast player? i guess a lot can change in two years #Cloudflare explains how Facebook disappeared from the internet
— interesting to see the immediate impact on other social networks #Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus back online after hours of downtime
— removed BGP routes locked out FB employees from offices, internal tools, and their own VPN, plus every site that uses FB auth #Facebook whistleblower on 60 Minutes
— “Facebook has set up a system of incentives that is pulling people apart” #Meet the original streamer, who ran his own public access gaming show in 1993
— “Video Games and More” was like Twitch on TV, with kids calling in to talk to a 12-year-old gamer instead of spamming chat via Cal Henderson #Garbage Day on the mystery of the “I Want To Live In This Era” photo
— “being nostalgic for being in the early-2010s being nostalgic for the 90s” #The Pandora Papers
— WaPo investigation based on 12M leaked documents reveal how the global elite shield their riches in international tax havens, including in the U.S. #virodome17 Is A Gmail Scammer
Pardon the extremely-specific post, but I’ve found myself at the center of a bizarre case of mistaken identity and writing publicly about it seemed like the best option to stop it.
Someone with the email address ‘[email protected]’ is emailing small independent online product manufacturers with an identical scam: they’re a huge fan of their products, but cut themselves on the packaging while opening it, and want a refund and damages. Screenshots of two examples are below, minus the photo of a gross bloody finger.
These companies are then contacting me via Twitter, Instagram, and email because they think that I’m the one that sent it. What gave them that impression? Well, take a look for yourself at the Google results when searching for that email address.
Despite the keyword “virodome17” not appearing anywhere on those pages, Google not only returns my 2016 tweets about Gmail’s “mic drop” April Fool’s joke, but also my LinkedIn page.
Combine this with the fact that the scammer signs his name “Andy,” and you can see where anyone would get the wrong idea that I was the sender. Is the scammer even impersonating me? It’s hard to say — “Andy” is a common name, and they’re not using my last name or any other aspect of my identity. They also don’t have control over what pages the Google algorithm returns, so it’s plausible this is just a bizarre coincidence.
Regardless, Google is ultimately responsible in two ways:
- The Google algorithm is irrelevantly returning my personal information for a completely unrelated search, leading to this identity mixup.
- Despite multiple reports to Gmail of fraudulent activity over the last year, the [email protected] is still actively attempting to defraud others with a Gmail account. I received two separate companies contacting me about this issue in the last 24 hours alone.
My hope is that Google indexes this blog post and it starts showing prominently for anyone searching for the scammer’s “[email protected]” address. But if you work on Gmail or Google Search, it’d be amazing if you could do something about it.
If you’re a company that received this scam and found this page, please post a comment about your experience. I’d love to see more screenshots, and I’ll post an update here if anything changes.
As a fun linguistics side note, I was curious about how both emails end with “do the needful,” a turn-of-phrase I’ve never heard before. Digging into it, this expression is apparently popular in India but rarely used outside of it, meaning “do the right thing.” The Guardian calls it “the granddaddy of all Indianisms,” so I think I have a pretty good hunch where this scammer’s from.
Update: Another company reached out to me on Twitter with the same experience, and I’ve confirmed privately they were using the same template scam. Multiple Google employees also contacted me privately to say they’ve escalated this search ranking issue, so I hope this will be resolved soon.
In the comments, yet another company the scammer contacted noted that the Gmail account is now bouncing, indicating Google’s taken action against it.
And, as predicted, the #1 Google result for [email protected] searches is now this post.
I doubt this will put an end to the scam, but it’ll hopefully end my role in it.