So my husband and I ate lunch at a cafe in a small town on Saturday that we’ve only been to once before, and now I’m getting spam emails from them, one Saturday and one Sunday (yesterday). WTH? How did they get my email address? They can’t get my email address from the credit card even if I paid (usually hubby pays). I certainly didn’t sign up for their email list. This is annoying.
Is it possible your cellphone service provider used the GPS location of the cafe and passed along a canned email? I’ve gotten promo messages on my cellphone sometimes when I was near businesses asking how my visit was. Always thought it was because I allowed Verizon to be nosy about where I go and they were spamming me. Not certain if I got emails from it, but it is not far fetched if your cell service provider has your email on file that they can automate this spam based on whether a business checked off allowing this type of social media contact. Just a guess. Call the cafe and ask. I mean, where I work, customer privacy is very important and we do not want to get complaints, especially if corporate gets involved. I’d be curious to see what the cafe e-mailed you.
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Thanks for the reply, and the suggestion to ask the cafe. In my case, it’s not the cell phone because our carrier doesn’t have my email address. But if they did, would airplane mode help?
I think we may have this figured out. I read the mice type in the emails and discovered the cafe is using a 3rd party marketing company called SquareUp (or Square, Square Online, Squaremktg, etc.). Then I googled.
If a business uses SquareUp, it provides Square with their customers’ info, then Square will share that info with other businesses it thinks the customers might be interested in. All I did at the cafe was order food and pay with credit card (so now they have my name and credit card info).
Then I searched my emails for any others containing the word square, and bingo – this originated 2 weeks ago when I went to a bike fitter, a service that helps determine the right bike measurements to use. I used my email to communicate with the bike fitter, and used my credit card to pay. They gave my info to SquareUp.** So when I went to the cafe, which is heavily used by cyclists, they must have reported to SquareUp that lisa5678 with credit card #whatever is our customer, and then Square matched my name and credit card # with what the bike fitter gave them and emailed me what appears to be offers from the cafe (one of which is ‘We’d like to celebrate your birthday’ just tell us when your birthday is, like hell I will).
** This needs to stop. Businesses you patronize should not be giving your info out without your consent. Why is this even allowed? There’s no accountability if the 3rd party/parties is hacked, no protection for me.
Great investigative work. That would have been my response. There are many 3rd party payment acceptance systems that businesses use (ie: Square, Clover, etc etc). Those payment acceptance systems have a lot of detail on especially if you used their system online. So, my guess … is that the payment processor passed along additional information (email address) to the business. I doubt they would pass along your credit card information because that gets very ugly quickly but since they know your credit card number, they can pass along other details about you to the business.
I think now it’s more likely that the participating businesses report to Square their customer transactions, and that Square sees if customer at Business B matches customer at Business A and sends the customer, by text or email, some promotional offer on behalf of Business B. I doubt that Square informs Business B all the info on me that was sent to them by Business A, or vice versa. So at this point, I doubt the cafe has my email address, but Square certainly does because the bike fitter reported it to them.
As for credit card number, you’re probably right that they shouldn’t distribute that, no business should, and maybe Square only knows the last 4 digits, or just enough to distinguish me from all other lisa5678s. So the cafe reported my name and credit card #, perhaps just the last 4 digits, to Square, and that matched what was given to Square by the bike fitter, and sent me an email (3 so far).
Also regarding the credit card number, my husband once noticed fraudulent charges on our old CC account and called the vendor (which is what the CC company tells you to do). In talking with the manager there, who was very nice, she said she only knows the name & phone number of the fraudster and the last 4 digits of our CC number. I guess the credit card company hides some account info from even vendors to protect against fraud (although the fraudster got it, or else filled in random numbers and the system let it go through).