Toptal Engineering Tries To Spam & Ride My Getty Images Extortion Letter Story

[Matthew Chan]

I just got one of the stupidest emails of all time from a moronic person from a moronic business trying to tie into one of my 2008 Getty Images extortion letter posts.

Dear Matthew,

My name is Irina and I'm the Developer Evangelist at Toptal. Our Toptal Engineering Blog has published a great post called "The Vital Guide to Web Design Interviewing," and I think it would be of interest to your readers, especially since your community has already published an article related to web design.

Is this something you would be interested in sharing on your site? In addition, I would be open to discussing other ways in which we could collaborate. Would you be up for a Skype chat sometime?

Kind Regards,
Irina

Irina Papuc | Toptal | 815-307-3957 (mobile)
irina.p@toptal .com | Skype: @irinel1957 | Schedule an appointment
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"Toptal Engineering" wants me to link a post I wrote 7 years ago regarding my receiving a Getty Images extortion letter: http://matthewchan.com/2008/06/17/i-received-a-getty-images-settlement-demand-letter/ to their "great post" "The Vital Guide to Web Design Interviewing". Sure, because my 2008 Getty Images extortion letter post is ABSOLUTELY related to their "website design interviewing".... NOT.

So, I am going to give them free advertising and hopefully Google will index this post with their business names. If anyone wants to contact these foreign, ripoff artists and have them work on your website, you now have the contact info.

I gave them my "standard" reply for spamming scammers.

You are a fucking idiot spammer who has no clue that that the link you provided from my website has absolutely NO CONNECTION to your topic whatsoever.  You obviously have no fucking clue what you are even submitting or what my article even says!

Take me off your spam list.

[stinger]

Take a valium, Matthew.

The lovely Miss Irina likely is simply fishing for easy marks.  She does not expect to catch everyone, and is likely expecting her success to be as rare as a prize trophy fish jumping into her boat. 

Although it really doesn't add any value to society, I would rather see people wasting their time like her than play the trolling game. 

What I dislike about Getty, picsout, and the new myriad of company names under which they allegedly practice their trolling game, is that they pretend they really have a case.  They waste the time of innocent letter recipients (some may be guilty and deserve to have their time wasted) without properly vetting the cases first.  They cause angst, fear, anxiety, and health problems for innocent people which ultimately subtracts value from society.

They should have to pay a price each and every time they make an accusation and threat that is actually unfounded. 

Miss Irina is easy to ignore.  And she expects to be ignored.

[Matthew Chan]

Gmail does a good job screening out most of the garbage that comes my way. However, I somehow get on a number of lists by vendors shilling out their Indian web development services. The Indian stuff are very annoying because they tend to get through the Gmail spam filters. The Nigerian stuff are so bad because of the horrible spelling and sentences, they get screened out easily by Gmail.

I get Chinese printing companies constantly pitching me book printing services also. Their English pitches are horrible.

I also get many offers from people who want to give me "great articles" to post on my various blogs.  I generally ignore them or tell them to take a hike.  I think it is sad that there is a niche industry begging bloggers like me (who know how to write legitimate content & get quality traffic without resorting to sleazy tactics) to post their crap. What is especially insulting is that the pay is crap.

Her spam email seemed to provide "legitimate" contact information and I figured I would blast her and help tarnish their Google reputation along the way. There is no penalty or consequence for just deleting the email so I decided to take a few minutes and whack them for a change and give them a "consequence".

What fool does she think she will find to promote their "web design interviewing" scummy paper? I can't imagine anyone who has any smarts would ever agree to it.