At first it was amusing for Liberal Democrat councillors in Haringey to be getting emails inviting them to come and meet Conservative candidate Chris Philp, particularly as Philp is not standing in Haringey but over the border in Hampstead & Kilburn.
Then there were a few chuckles about how the emails kept on getting people’s names wrong. So, for example, an email from Chris Philp inviting people to come and meet him and David Cameron was sent to Rachel but addressed to “Dear Walter”.
Then the emails switched to coming from the national Conservative Party. And this time Rachel was no longer “Walter” but “Melanie”.
Right gender at least.
But then there’s the more dodgy aspect to all this. Because one councillor noticed that the emails were coming to his private address.
Not his public email address, the one the council uses or the one that goes on leaflets. Instead, his personal address that is not advertised and isn’t given out.
So he contacted Chris Philp asking where he had got his email address from.
The answer?
Silence.
Tsk tsk. Especially as it’s not just Chris Philp but also the national Conservative Party that has somehow got hold of the private address, not to mention a whole load of other mangled and wrong data.
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One Comment
Well, that’s a familiar enough pattern to any sysadmin. This is almost certainly a spammer’s list. They’re very cheap, invariably full of errors, and completely illegal.
Forget the politics, this one needs a criminal investigation. Whoever bought that list is directly supporting identity theft, and there is no way they did this by accident or without realising what they were doing. We have laws against this stuff, but they’re very rarely enforced due to the culprits normally being located in a country that doesn’t have any laws about it – but here we have a paper trail that has got to lead to somebody in the UK.