Recently, the amount of spam I've been receiving has increased by an order of magnitude. I assumed it was just the usual propagation of spammers' lists of valid email addresses, until I got one particular email a few minutes ago:

Dear JEFF,

Thank you for your interest in the SFI Affiliate Program!

Here is the registration information we received:

Name: JEFF LEE
Address: 5214 POMPEO WAY, TAMPA, FL 32689
Country: US
Email: godfrey@shipbrook.com
[...]

Not only is the address almost entirely incorrect (they got only the city and state right), but "Pompeo" is the last name of two of my closest friends.

So apparently, some cowardly douchebag — who knows me well enough to know who my friends are — has some sort of problem with me, but instead of actually confronting me about it, he or she is going around signing me up for spam and pyramid schemes.

That's right. Cowardly douchebag. Not enough spine to approach me personally, not enough intestinal fortitude to identify himself or herself. But that in itself gives me a pretty good idea who it is.

However, I don't want to blame someone falsely! Although the originators of this email appear to be some kind of pyramid scheme, they're at least ethical enough to send confirmation requests before signing someone up, and they have a "satisfactory" record with the Better Business Bureau. So perhaps they'll be good enough to provide me with the IP address whence the signup request came. Thanks to my Website's referrer logs, I know which IP addresses belong to the people I know.

And then a quick email to the offender's ISP should put things in order pretty quickly; that sort of thing is usually prohibited by most ISPs' Terms of Service agreements, and grounds for account termination.