People searching for me at Reunion.com

[Mister_Rik]

Some time before my 20-year high school reunion I signed up at www.reunion.com. Ever since then, I’ve been getting a buttload of e-mails from these guys informing me of things like:

Searches for [Phase42] in your age range:

• 8 Total Searches

Is it your high school sweetie? Your former neighbor? Your long-lost best friend? The possibilities are absolutely ENDLESS! Become a Premium Member of Reunion.com today so you’ll be the first to know when someone from your past would like to become part of your future!

These show up every few days. It’s always a different number of searches.

I’d dismiss most e-mails like this as spam, but I did sign up for the site and I did legitimately opt-in to their mailing list. These e-mails also use both my legal given name and the diminutive I usually answer to - spam usually uses one or the other.

My question is, are all these people really trying to look me up, or is it just a ploy to get me to upgrade to a premium membership? I mean, when I first signed up at the site, I certainly poked around a bit to see if I could find any of my old buddies. I mostly didn’t, so I haven’t been back since my reunion. Frankly, I can’t think of eight people who would try to look me up after all this time.

[Colophon]

I vote for BS. All these sites basically want you to pony up for premium membership, so they’re bound to bait up the water a bit.

[miamouse]

Is your name common enough so that there might be people looking for another Mr. Phase 42?

My name IRL is two very common hispanic names. I think there are 26 of us in the bronx alone. Plus since the email they sent you said ‘age range’, it’s a safe bet that it’s another Phase 42.

[AndrewL]

I get these too. I suspect that the alleged searched for me are either completely fictional, or the actions of some type of automated bots harvesting information for spam and junk mail.

[Mister_Rik]

@miamouse

Is your name common enough so that there might be people looking for another Mr. Phase 42?

My name IRL is two very common hispanic names. I think there are 26 of us in the bronx alone. Plus since the email they sent you said ‘age range’, it’s a safe bet that it’s another Phase 42.

My name certainly isn’t unusual, but in forty years I’ve only met two non-relatives with the same last name, and one of those spelled it differently. I know there was a guy in my state the same age as me with the same name who was killed in a car wreck. It really panicked my aunt, who worked for the state, when the accident report came across her desk

I suppose their “8 searches” could have come from all over the country, since they didn’t specify that these were former schoolmates doing the searching.