not amused

[Nick]

This is what brings me here! Coach Creative or someone with access to their list of members, has either sold, given, traded or not been careful enough with my address and I found this in my mailbox this morning. I am not amused.

A message from John Johnson to all members of Writer's Clique on CoachCreativeSpace!

♥if you are single and ready to mingle; click here!!!♥

do this right now only take 2 minutes, register a free account
♥Singlesnet – is the best online place to meet people!♥
get immediate access email addresses, phone numbers;
takes only 2 minutes to complete form and find new love!!

[Julia]

Phew, just reading and caught up on this-good onya Dan-this is like a sacred group, built on trust with a heap of support from everyone-it's great you have the integrity to keep it that way hugs

[DJ]

OK, Dan's on guard.
I feel better...

[Nick]

In effect, my surprise was due to to never having found anything from CCS, of this nature, in my mailbox before.

[Claude Aimee Villeneuve]

I'm glad Dan banned the culprit! We have to be vigilant and get rid of the spammers right away! Fortunately it doesn't happen too often here!

[Jules]

I got about five of those messages. I just assumed someones account had been hijacked- Like that virus that was going around elsewhere- where it would get into your addressbook and send itself out everywhere...so I just deleted and did not think of it again until now
It is really a shame that people do things like that.

[Ang Monsoon]

i get loads of spam msges. anyway, and did do 'fore even coming on CCS, it seems to just one of those things. It was so different from any other msges. I've had from CCS-people that I just presumed this fellow was on the "make". It never occurred to me that Dan-the-Man would do such a thing.

[Nick]

I am happy to hear you have not compromised your integrity, Dan. Sadly not everyone has the same ethics.
Thanks, Nick

[Dan Goodwin]

Hi Nick,

We had a rogue member join earlier today - "John Johnson" - who clearly had the sole intent of spamming people with his singles dating info. He joined a number of different groups, and sent out batch messages to all members of those groups, which is why you, me, and many others will have received his spam messages. His membership has now been ended.

The only person that has access directly to your personal email address is me, as the site creator and only administrator of CCS.

CCS is a public site, free to view and free to join, so anyone can join. Whilst the vast majority of our new members are genuine creatives, looking to interact and share with other genuine creatives, we inevitably from time to time have a tiny proportion of people join with only the intention of self promotion of their websites, completely unrelated to creativity. As soon as these kind of messages are noticed, they can be removed.

In the nearly two and a half years CCS has been running I believe I have only had cause to remove a handful of these members/ messages, out of 600+ members in total. I hope you can see it is a rare occurrence, and an unfortunate, inevitable pay off to having CCS completely free and open for anyone to join, as opposed to being a private, closed, paid membership site.

Thank you for bringing this to my attention in this case. I would like to reassure you that this "member" contacted you only via CCS groups, and only I have access to your personal email address and would never sell, rent or trade it with anyone else.

I would like to reassure others here too than I have not sold CCS and that I take people's privacy of email addresses and the integrity of CCS very seriously.

Thanks again for your vigilance Nick, I would be grateful for anyone who comes across any other rogue activity such as this in the future to contact me without hesitation.

Kind regards,

Dan