How Elecrow became a SPAM machine (Rant)

[L1L1]

Hi all,

I guess this will sound like a rant, but I feel that this is the best place to get this out...

I'm the owner of a small online marketplace for open hardware electronics called Lectronz, which hosts many sellers who propose their products to hardware enthusiasts.

Yesterday, someone used the contact form we provide on each product page to send the same message repeatedly to our sellers. The message starts as "I am highly interested in your electronic work and would like to acquire more information...". The sender has an ordinary gmail address. But the few people who responded quickly discovered that this was just a bait email from Elecrow, one of the low-cost PCB makers from Shenzhen, inviting our sellers to join their ship and sell their hardware on their own platform. After connecting the dots, we discovered that this was the second SPAM campaign they launched against our community in the past months. Naturally, our sellers weren't pleased.

This is pathetic of course. 

And it doesn't stop here. We have been informed that Elecrow has used the same tactics to spam people on Hackaday DMs and Twitter DMs.

Elecrow provided a pretty decent service to the hardware community a decade ago. Today, it seems that they have just become a massive SPAM machine. I assume they got crushed by the competition (JLCPCB) and are now desperate to make a dollar. I urge everyone to avoid using their services. With that kind of company culture, who knows what they will do with your personal data or intellectual property.

Alain

[ataradov]

Same observation here. I actually asked them to close my account and forget my information, since it was not even possible to do in their UI. Still got spam, so I just made a filter to automatically mark their stuff as spam and delete it.

If you are making an Elecrow account, you are subscribing for infinite spam.