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May 3, 2004
"I have one email message
offering a 2.95% mortgage, and another saying that poor credit is not a problem.
Should I take these seriously?"
Follow my lead and take them to the
delete bin.
When I log onto my computer in the
morning, I might find 100 letters in my in-box, of which about 75 will be spam.
The largest category are those that want to enhance my sexual capacity in one
way or another, but those looking to interest me in a mortgage run a close
second.
A spamster I once spoke to told me
why mortgage spam makes outrageous claims. "The more outrageous the
claim," he said very matter-of-factly, "the higher the response
rate." This is why we read about "2.95% mortgages", "poor
credit not a problem", "we cut your payment by 45%", "buy
the home you couldn�t dream you could afford", "you are
approved", and on and on.
These claims, like those for
enhancing my sexuality, are all fantasy. Most of the people who make the claims
aren�t loan providers and have no say regarding mortgage prices or the
borrower approval process. Mortgage lenders and brokers initiate very little
mortgage spam.
Most mortgage spam comes from lead
generation sites that are in the business of compiling information on potential
mortgage borrowers, then selling it to lenders or brokers. The sole purpose of
the enticing messages is to induce you to fill out a questionnaire. A completed
questionnaire is a lead, for which loan providers will pay $40 or more,
depending on how much information it contains.
When I examined lead generation
sites two years ago, I called them "auction sites" because they
promised borrowers that up to 4 loan providers would contact them and bid for
their loan. I found 9 of them at the time, of which Lending Tree was the
largest. But I don�t recognize any of the 9 in the spam I am getting, which
seems to originate with new players.
This is a very easy business to
enter. All you need is a web site with a questionnaire for potential borrowers
to fill out; a deal with a spam distributor to spread your outrageous claims as
widely across the internet as possible; and deals with loan providers, or with a
lead wholesaler, to sell the leads.
If you fill out the questionnaire of
a mortgage spamster, you will be solicited by one or more loan providers. You
will know nothing about them but they will know a lot about you. Having paid
good money for that information, they are highly motivated to land you as a
client. To accomplish that, some of them may make promises that are as phony as
those of the spamster who enticed you into the process.
Postscript: A few days after
drafting this piece, I logged onto my email server and was startled to find�
NO SPAM! An inquiry disclosed that the firm operating my email account had
installed a state-of-the-art filtering program that had successfully blocked it
all. It looked great, so why was I feeling uneasy?
For one thing, I wondered about the
possibility that the filter might have caught some legitimate stuff in addition
to the spam. Fortunately, I was able to check this because my email is
accessible from two sources, one of which is not filtered. And sure enough, I
found a letter from a reader that the filter erroneously classified as spam.
In general, the more effective a
filter is in screening out spam, the greater the likelihood that it will also
grab some non-spam. The filter on my server worked a little too well.
My spamless email register made me
uneasy for another reason. I realized that if the filter had been installed a
few weeks earlier, I never would have written this column, which arose out of my
own experience with mortgage spam. The filter was cutting me off from
information I wanted, even if I was advising every one else to ignore it.
So I drafted a note to the
technician who installed the filter: "Cory, I really love having a clean
email register, I particularly delight in no longer having to look at ads
questioning my sexual prowess, but could you please give me back my mortgage
spam?"
Copyright Jack Guttentag 2004
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