This makes me sick.
HDFC Bank is offering to donate five rupees to charity for every valid email address or phone number you send them. So, not satisfied with spamming it’s own clientele, it now wants them to turn in their friends and family. It’s positively Stalinesque. Ashcroftian. Disgusting.
I could rant about why it stinks so much, but Madman has already done it here. I suggest you check it out. But of course that’s only a suggestion.
The following options are now open to me:
- Stop banking with them- close my account and send them a stiff letter telling them I refuse to place my trust in a bank that uses unethical practices to harvest email addresses and mobile numbers
- If Zimbu the Webhost Monkey permits me to do so- create two hundred email addresses at aadisht.net, set all of them to forward to the HDFC Bank Marketing Director’s email, and send them all to this scheme. Charity will get a kilorupee, and the idiot who dreamed up this scheme or approved it will get a taste of his own medicine.
- If Zimbu doesn’t let me create two hundred email addresses that do nothing, write a simple script that emails a stiff letter to the HDFC marketing director every time you load the page. This has the advantage of being ‘hardly a ten minutes job’.
- And if I want to be really nasty, set that script to reload itself, so that it’ll send an email every second, and not stop until you close the window manually.
Advice, anybody? I’m definitely closing my account once the semester ends.