Credit Card Offer Addressed To 'Lisa Is A Slut McIntire'

The junk mail world is off to a rough start in 2014. Just weeks after a man in Chicago received an upsetting OfficeMax mailing to "Mike Seay Daughter Killed In Car Crash," a California-based writer got a Bank of America credit card offer from the Golden Key Honor Society for "Lisa Is A Slut McIntire." In the case of Seay, the mailing was accurate; his daughter had been in a fatal car accident the year before. In the case of McIntire, Time's Jessica Roy writes, "For the record, we know Lisa, and the only S-word she is is SUPER."

Both Bank of America and the Golden Key (Dis)Honor Society have (smartly) apologized to McIntire via Twitter, where she first posted photos of the mailing, promising to get back to her personally to let her know what happened. McIntire is a member of the Honor Society that dissed her. "I suspect the, uh, screw-up originated with them," she says via Twitter. Maybe junk mail senders have simply figured out that putting something offensive and shocking on a mailing is the best way to stop someone from just automatically throwing it out.

“What kind of got my adrenaline pumping is that I’m a feminist writer on the Internet, so getting a piece of mail that my mom is opening that says I’m a 'slut' made me think, 'Oh god, which troll of mine is doing this?' " McIntire, 32, told the Los Angeles Times.

I think we're now likely to play the "track the data" game. Target lists are regularly bought and sold in the world of direct mailing. When OfficeMax had its snafu last month, it blamed a third-party data broker from which it had bought a "Businesses, Small Offices and Home Offices" mailing list. OfficeMax declined to identify the source of the list, but the Wall Street Journal reported that the data came from All Things Remembered, "according to two data broker firms involved in the transaction." Via the WSJ:

A spokeswoman for Infogroup Inc., a data broker that buys and sells data for Things Remembered, confirmed that the data had originated from the Highland Heights, Ohio, gift retailer. One clue on how it got the detail came from a purchase at the store. Mr. Seay said friends of the family recently sent a set of digital picture frames from the Things Remembered retail chain, to display photos of his daughter Ashley, who was 17.

We still don't know why All Things Remembered would decide to remember that detail in its database. They did not respond to my request for comment.

As to how "slut" got attached to Lisa McIntire's name, that's still a mystery.

After its incident, OfficeMax said it would start doing keyword searches to make sure information like that did not wind up on the front of an envelope. Bank of America , Golden Key, and other companies that are buying data from third parties and slapping it on their own advertising may want to do the same.

For more: Lisa McIntire on Twitter, Gawker, Los Angeles Times, Time, New York Magazine