Over the past few months I received a lot of spam about a site called Fanbox.com. I finally set up a disposable email account and joined. I was not at all surprised to find that I suddenly had many fans. Even a skinny geek is a â€œhunkâ€ to a chatbot!!! Yes, all, but one of my fans were chatbots for sex talk. Perhaps I'll record their script and post it later. I'm not sure about the other fan... a school called 'Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca' in Romania sounds a little suspicious to me.

I assumed that Fanbox was just a front for the 'pay-for-sex-chat' industry. Imagine my surprise when, after a couple of months, I remembered the site and decided to log in and was greeted with

"Attention FanBox Users: To protect out users from FAKE Web-cam girls, all profiles that communicate or display IM, EMAIL or Web site URL info or nudity will be deactivated. Please check your profile to ensure that it is not displaying info or nudity. We apologize for the inconvenience while we clean up the site for everyone's enjoyment. Thanks, the FanBox team."

I wonder how they will protect me from the real web cam girls tough :)

It does appear that FanBox really wants to be a respectable site, but they have a really big task ahead of them. I thought that their site was pretty much all fake web cam girls. Every time I checked someone wanted to be the fan of a guy with virtually no profile at all and they liked my profile. I guess less is more! Now I do not receive any fan mail, but then I don't have any information on my profile, so it seems to be working as almost as expected. I'm not sure about the three guys who wish to be the fan of "Mr. Me".

The last webcam email I received was more than two weeks ago. The one from a month ago was really adorable though. Jen is 21, 5'7 and apparently you can't ask a lady her weight. Her job is 'Web Mistress/College' and she requires a credit card for a free webcam show. I suspect a credit card fraud site, but I am not prepared to hand over my credit card info, so if any of you want me to do more research, send me your name, credit card number, expiration date, and CCV code!

Kudos to Fanbox for a really massive cleanup effort. I'm sure going to miss those little chatbots. It is so cute when you ask a computer program if it is real and it tells you "I am 100% real, I hate fakes."

My spam account appreciates the relief from Fanbox: it really is noticeable.

Randy Abrams
Director of Technical Education