Gamespot, Spammers, and Joseph Ngoho

By Shamus Posted Sunday Aug 13, 2006

Filed under: Rants 2 comments

Way back in January I had a rant about signing up for Gamespot and getting spam from the one-time email I gave them. I also had a follow-up post in February. I linked to someone else who was experiencing the same thing. I just got a comment on that five month old post indicating that this is still going on: Everyone who signs on with Gamespot gets this rotten scam email.

Visitor Bethany wrote:

I just got the exact same e-mail and googled the name “Joseph Ngoho” and got this blog as the top result. So apparently this has been going on since January and nothing's been done about it. What was scary to me was that I just signed up for gmail last week, so very few people know it and I haven't used it on any websites. I for one would like to know who this Joseph is and how he gets unsolicited e-mail addresses.

Me too.

So we are led to believe that Gamespot is a bunch of Spammers. They have the same M.O. as FilePlanet: Secure a bunch of popular files, offer them for download, and then make visitors who want the files run a gauntlet of ads, culminating in a forced sign-up. Gamespot seems to have taken the extra step of selling (or being careless with) that sign-up info. They can no longer claim to not know about the problem. People have been complaining about this for over half a year now. The accusation is easily provable: Just create a new account with a virgin email and you’ll get a letter from Joseph Ngoho.

So which is it Gamespot? Are you frauds, or imbeciles? Your choice.

 


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2 thoughts on “Gamespot, Spammers, and Joseph Ngoho

  1. KelThuzad says:

    This makes me happy I have never signed up to join or pay for, their downloads. I’ll just download it from fileplanet or something, and I’ll be saved the annoyance of scammers too.

  2. demontrace says:

    Any chance something can be done about this?

    Could always take the route that opens a business’ eyes, a lawsuit. This is assuming that is possible, which I’m sure would rely a lot on whether or not they actually state that your email address will be sold to a 3rd party.

    I for one am not pleased with this, and would love something to be done, something that punishes Gamespot. Bad publicity works, but it has to be on a large scale. At least here, we have a point of reference: multiple people complaining about this one spammer, and all leads point to Gamespot as the culprit.

    Gamespot may not be the only one doing this, but if enough companies get singled out, and punished, maybe the rest will stop this careless practice.

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