Quechup = Spam

Over the past few days, I’ve received a few invites to Quechup, some sort of social network. Each time, the person sending the invite followed up with an email just like the following:

Subject: Do NOT act on email from Quechup

I apologize for the general nature of this email. If you received an
email from me asking you to join a new social network called Quechup,
PLEASE DO NOT ACT ON IT.

DELETE THE EMAIL IMMEDIATELY.

It was a service I learned about through an email from a trusted friend
and the service got a hold of and spammed you without asking my
permission.

As a public service to you, you probably want to skip this network. I checked Compete and Quantcast, and both show that Quechup.com had around 25,000 visitors in July. They reached that level in May and haven’t shown any growth since. It seems like even if they’re getting people there, those visitors are not sticking around. Countering that though, Quantcast says most of the site’s visits come from regulars (though none are addicts, compared to Facebook which gets 68% of visits from addicts).

Epilogue: As I wrote this, I received a fourth invite to Quechup. I’m waiting to see how long it will be before the retraction comes in.

UPDATE: Matt Dickman is actually the source of the email I quoted, and he wrote about his experiences with Quechup on his own blog (for the small bit of link value it’s worth, I’d rather Quechup link to his post to give a minor boost to the search engine visibility). While you should of course go to his blog, I’m copying these tips he has for reporting them, as I’m sure he won’t this post spreading as far as it can go – these are copied verbatim from him:

• Google: Send an email about their scam to code-hosting@google.com and be specific to their URL and what they did wrong.
• Yahoo: Complete this form stating your Yahoo ID and other pertinent info
• Federal Trade Commission: Fill out this form to report them to the FTC