Over the past couple weeks I’ve gotten emails from both Senators and a House Rep from the State of Minnesota. All three emails have been concerning the Israel/Palestine conflict, and are worded as replies to a some message I sent them.
I’ve never set foot in the state, let alone lived there (I’m on the other side of the country). I’ve never sent messages to any of those members of Congress, and I’ve never signed any petition giving any group the right to contact Congress about this matter.
I suspect my name and email address might have been used in some sort of astroturfing campaign targeting Congress. Or these might be spam emails impersonating the members of Congress for some reason. I noticed the House rep and one of the Senators is up for re-election this year.
Has anyone else gotten emails like this?
I’ve tried to send messages back to these people but the forms on their websites require submitting an address in their state/district, so I’m not sure what to do. The From: addresses seem like they might have been faked, or they’re no-reply addresses, so I wasn’t sure about just replying to the emails.
I also thought about calling their offices but I wasn’t sure if this was something important enough to bother their staff about, and they’re two hours ahead of me so their offices are closed by the time I get off work anyway.
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They don’t read like phishing emails. They’re not asking for donations or information or giving a link to click on or anything. They’re the exact kind of reply you’d expect to get when messaging a Senator or Representative about an issue: a boilerplate response summarizing the issue, stating their position and thanking me for writing in.
I just never sent any message, nor did I give anyone permission to send one on my behalf.
What’s the scam? Baiting me into replying in order to reel me in? Checking if there’s a human on the other end? Trying to sway public opinion ahead of an election?
This is suspicious. Reach out to their office. Maybe it is a mistake maybe it was malicious.
And that’s the other thing, why Minnesota? They have my name and email, that’s not too surprising: I’m well aware of how easy that information is to come by. But they couldn’t be bothered to look up what state I live in and realize that it would be a waste of time to target me?
Sending emails isn’t free, even if you have a mail server or a botnet to do it for you, it still takes time and computing power and bandwidth. So why wouldn’t you try to whittle down the list as much as possible?
It seems more likely that the replies might be genuine, but the message that prompted them wasn’t.
It’s a safe bet that the staff at these offices wouldn’t have the time to verify that the message actually came from one of their constituents, especially if they’re receiving them in bulk. I’d expect the replies to be mostly automated anyway, but the messages would still affect their internal statistics.
If someone’s using a mass email campaign to try to sway members of Congress, that’s really fucking concerning to me.