Now, I like to keep myself secure through the use of firewalls, anti-virus scanners and adware/malware scanners, and I always make sure that they are kept up to date, but there’s always that tiny risk of something nasty slipping through my defenses.

So any newsletter that starts with “VIRUS ALERT” naturally gets my attention.

(btw, Michael sent me two emails a few hour apart – the other email had a title that started with “EXTREMELY DANGEROUS VIRUS ALERT “)

Inside Michael continues his use of capital letters with this:

EXTREMELY DANGEROUS VIRUS ALERT!

HUGE VIRUS COMING!

PLEASE FORWARD THIS WARNING AMONG YOUR FRIENDS, FAMILY AND CONTACTS

Then he continues to talk about how he heard about this virus from a fellow marketer, that it has been verified by Norton Anti-Virus as a real threat and seals the deal with information that it’s been classified by Microsoft as the most destructive virus ever.

Now, you don’t have to have been online for very long to smell a hoax or an urban legend when you see one – and this had all the bells and whistles of a hoax, so I made a quick visit on Google searching for “postcard from hallmark virus” and confirmed my suspicion – it’s all a hoax.

It’s an urban legend, and it’s been around for at least 2 years now.

Hoaxes as such don’t piss me off, but unprofessional or dishonest marketers do.

Michael Holder is imo either extremely unprofessional by relaying information of that kind without doing any due dilligence at all – twice. It’s not even a new hoax, where current information on the subject might not have been conclusive – it’s so old that it’s been a confirmed hoax for 2 years.

The other alternative I listed, a dishonest marketer, would be if Michael knew that the “postcard from Hallmark” virus warning was a hoax, but deliberately sent it out to his newsletter subscribers so they could get scared and forward his promo mail to all their friends.

It is after all one page with the hoax followed by 10 pages advertising various products, so promo mail rather than newsletter is imo an appropriate term.

(one of the advertised products is even a 5 day crash course in “proper business etiquette”…)

I unsubscribed on the spot.

And I’m not going near anything with Michael Holders name on it again because I simply don’t trust him after he pulled this stunt on me.

It really saddens me when I feel that some marketer has deliberately tried to scare me into sending his promo material to all my friends, family and contacts by stuffing a false virus warning down my throat.

The really “funny” thing about it all is that it’s less than a month ago that Michael Holder sent me a mail with a title that started with “False Advertising Or Ignorance” where he pounded an unnamed marketer for marketing something as “new” when in fact it had been around for a long time