Sunny Ghai Spam

[Atul Chitnis <achitnis@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

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

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Atul Chitnis       | achitnis@xxxxxxxxxxx (PGP:6011BCB8)
Exocore Consulting | http://www.exocore.com
Bangalore, India   | +91(80)3440397 Fax +91(80)3341137
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