See, I am not convinced that it was an innocent "automated mistake". This is equivalent to the anecdotal old excuse one always hears from the government officia

See, I am not convinced that it was an innocent "automated mistake". This is equivalent to the anecdotal old excuse one always hears from the government officials: "the computer did it". When some spamming process like this is automated, all it means is that it is being inflicted on lots of people and most likely deliberately, so automation is not something that can be accepted as an excuse, on the contrary, it is an aggravating circumstance. I incline towards the opinion that these sharks do it quite deliberately. They just don't care how many people they embarrass and annoy, as long as some of those tech-innocent grannies and plumbers join up and thus put figures on their business projection sheets that get these sharks closer to cashing in big on an FB style IPO.