Misc: You want a link exchange? I'll give you link exchange!

This is a funny-sad sort of thing. I've just received the following email.

Dear Webmaster,

My name is Robert Williams, and I run the web site Work At Home Business
Website:

http://www.work-at-home-business-website.com/

I recently found your site http://ideceive.blogspot.com and am very
interested in exchanging links. I've gone ahead and posted a link to your
site, on this page:

http://www.work-at-home-business-website.com/linkmachine/resources/resources_advertising_3.html

As you know, reciprocal linking benefits both of us by raising our search
rankings and generating more traffic to both of our sites. Please post a
link to my site as follows:

Title: Work At Home Business Website
URL: http://www.work-at-home-business-website.com/
Description: Working from home is a dream for many but actually going
ahead and starting a home business is very difficult. Let us help!

Once you've posted the link, let me know the URL of the page that it's on,
by entering it in this form:

http://www.work-at-home-business-website.com/linkmachine/resources/link_exchange.php?ua=_ua9&site_index=MjA5ODQzMQ%3D%3D

You can also use that form to make changes to the text of the link to your
site, if you'd like.

Thank you very much,

Robert Williams

Right. Call me suspicious by nature, but I seriously doubt that this "Robert Williams" has ever laid eyes on my humble blog. Instead, there is strong circumstantial evidence to suggest that this is spam generated by ethically dubious "Linkmachine" software. The "premium" edition of this software "finds potential link exchange partner sites" and "searches websites for contact e-mail address". Can you put two and two together?

As for Mr Williams' work-at-home-business-website and his request for a link, I'm going to oblige him, but not quite on the terms he requested.

Sales pitch mode: on.

Working from home is a dream for many, but actually going ahead and starting a home business is very difficult. Furthermore, there are many scammers out there who would like to sell you a short-cut to a simple and profitable work-at-home business. Such people set up vacuous, junky "work at home" websites, and send spam inviting you to join in. They make outlandish claims about the ability to earn a thousand or more dollars a month without any real effort. If this doesn't scream "scam" at you, you should probably increase your daily dose of scepticism.

Sales pitch mode: off.

Bah! Humbug!