Beware the MSJ subscription scam

Date:January 9, 2006 / year-entry #15
Tags:other
Orig Link:https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060109-29/?p=32713
Comments:    7
Summary:Stephen Toub from MSDN Magazine alerts us to the MSJ subscription scam. Somebody has been sending out (via paper mail) a fake subscription offer for Microsoft Systems Journal, a magazine that ceased publication back in 2000. Read Stephen's article for more details as well as a copy of the scam letter itself. (The address for...

Stephen Toub from MSDN Magazine alerts us to the MSJ subscription scam. Somebody has been sending out (via paper mail) a fake subscription offer for Microsoft Systems Journal, a magazine that ceased publication back in 2000. Read Stephen's article for more details as well as a copy of the scam letter itself. (The address for the "publisher" is a rented mailbox at a what appears to be a UPS Store in the Beaumont Centre mall.) Under no circumstances send these people any money!


Comments (7)
  1. Jiho Han says:

    We could send them monopoly money

  2. Matt Sayler says:

    I was asked about this by my boss last week. As noted above, the letter is worded in a (intentionally) confusing manner that makes it seem like YOU MUST PAY THEM MONEY.

  3. Pepito says:

    How do you know it was intentional?

  4. Yaytay says:

    Shame it isn’t genuine, MSJ was so much better than the poor thing that MSDN Magazine has become.

  5. That one Ian guy says:

    Bringing back MSJ would be awesome. The tagline could be "Your definitive source for writing -native- code for the Windows operating system." It could compete head-on with MSDN Magazine and the sales numbers could be used as a proof for those who misconstrue the market.

  6. Nishant Sivakumar says:

    They can be traced through their postal address. Perhaps Microsoft could sue them on everyone’s behalf?

Comments are closed.


*DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT OWN THIS CONTENT. If you are the owner and would like it removed, please contact me. The content herein is an archived reproduction of entries from Raymond Chen's "Old New Thing" Blog (most recent link is here). It may have slight formatting modifications for consistency and to improve readability.

WHY DID I DUPLICATE THIS CONTENT HERE? Let me first say this site has never had anything to sell and has never shown ads of any kind. I have nothing monetarily to gain by duplicating content here. Because I had made my own local copy of this content throughout the years, for ease of using tools like grep, I decided to put it online after I discovered some of the original content previously and publicly available, had disappeared approximately early to mid 2019. At the same time, I present the content in an easily accessible theme-agnostic way.

The information provided by Raymond's blog is, for all practical purposes, more authoritative on Windows Development than Microsoft's own MSDN documentation and should be considered supplemental reading to that documentation. The wealth of missing details provided by this blog that Microsoft could not or did not document about Windows over the years is vital enough, many would agree an online "backup" of these details is a necessary endeavor. Specifics include:

<-- Back to Old New Thing Archive Index