Pirate Marketing

A term describing the so-called "marketing strategy" of spammers who "advertise" or plug) their products and services by using people’s email addresses to send out bulk mail messages to all the contacts they've hijacked, pretending the email was written by the person who's identity they have hacked into. This is done to suggest a person has tried and tested the product and to spread bogus word of mouth virally. This is entirely fraudulent and can potentially hurt a person’s reputation, but thankfully this method is used by individuals and groups who are just as stupid as the people they are trying to scam (i.e. catering to the lowest denominator). For this reason, the spam message itself is usually as easy to detect, as the cheap knockoffs (or stolen goods) they are trying to unload on unsuspecting victims. According to Wikipedia, spam averages 78% of all e-mail sent.