Microsoft gives away fake prizes

I got spammed by the giant of Redmond a couple of weeks ago, offering me “cool prizes”, just to search the web using their struggling search engine.

From: <microsoftlive@sendemedia.com>
To: <xxx@lutrov.com>
Subject: Get cool prizes for searching
Date: 2008-06-20 21:31

Want to earn cool prizes for your online searching? Join the Live Search Trial Program and we’ll reward your searching with tickets that you can exchange for prizes. The more you search, the more tickets you could earn.

The rest of the details have been omitted on the grounds of brevity and irrelevancy, except where it proclaims:

Offer valid only for legal residents in the 50 United States and Washington, D.C.

Aside from the fact that Microsoft are not supposed to know my email address because I never registered it with them anywhere, there’s a couple of other glaring problems which just make the Microsludge boys look rather stupid:

• The server which has hosted our domain for the last nine years is not located in America.
• The whois data for our domain clearly shows none of the contacts to be in America.

If Google can dynamically recognise a person’s location by their IP address, why can’t Billysoft tell which country a domain belongs to?

Posted in Announcements, Business, Email, Marketing, Microsoft by Ivan