Attention all: I have been receiving an uncomfortably large number of reports from people about them being spammed by someone named "Sunny Ghai" who represents himself as a Silicon Valley company looking for tech writers. His modus operandi appears to be to solicit technical articles from people by sending them a Word attachment describing the "deal". Apart from the completely obnoxious way this person is soliciting (using spam), he appears to be basically looking for stuff to boost his Mumbai based operations. All his communication speaks of his Mumbai office, including needing developers for his Mumbai operations. There is also a big question about the genuineness of this offer. I have no proof of this being a scam, but have seen several of scams before that operated in a similar fashion, so I urge you to be cautious. Previous scams I have seen solicit documents, which are then "rejected", but quietly used anyway later, usually under another name. I have checked the websites in quetsion, and have found most articles there apparently written by one or two persons. The Word document he encloses definitely does not inspire confidence. I could be wrong - anyone who has done business with him and actually seen the money, please let me know. He has so far spammed me several times - at several of my email addresses, almost every time with a 37 KB MS Word attachment. More than a dozen people have also reported that they have received this spam in which the covering email note starts with "Dear Atul Chitnis" or "Dear Atul"! Whether this was intentional or a mistake is hard to say, but I have heard from people I do not know at all, asking why they received a message addressed to me. And this has been going on for more than a month now. Some people receive the message without the attachment (one of the messages to me was without the attachment). As an example, Nikhil Datta and I received a solicitation one evening at the same time - Nikhil's offer contained the document, but mine didn't. The messages were posted within seconds of each other. He seems to be milking of mailing lists (especially the Linux India lists), websites and magazines (PCQ, Chip, etc.) for addresses, and there does not appear to be any sort of technical qualification - I know of several people who have received this offer who couldn't write a two-line tech note if their life depended on it. It is also possible that this is an attempt to get more exposure for his websites. I would advise *everyone* receiving this "offer" to treat it with extreme caution, for three reasons: - it is very clearly spam (unsolicited email), and this form of solicitation should not be encouraged in any way. - there is no way of proving the genuineness of the offer. - several people have forwarded this "offer document" to other people. In the process, the enclosed Word document could get infected with a macro virus if the document has been opened with an infected copy of Word. Please note that while I could be completely wrong about this, I am *not* wrong about his solicitation methods, which is spam. Each time attaching an unsolicited (and potentially dangerous) document just compounds the offence. Atul -------------------------------------------------------- Atul Chitnis | [EMAIL PROTECTED] (PGP:6011BCB8) Exocore Consulting | http://www.exocore.com Bangalore, India | +91(80)3440397 Fax +91(80)3341137 -------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- The LIH mailing list archives are available at: http://lists.linux-india.org/cgi-bin/wilma/linux-india-help
