There is not much that surprises online marketing guys these days. However, this offer was too good not to look into. An offer to purchase more than one million email addresses with name, last name and Facebook profile information for $5. Bogomil Shopov paid and received 12 Excel sheets, each containing the data of about 100,000 users.
Shopov said that "most" of the addresses are real and that he even knows some of the people listed. The fact that the data is available may not be so surprising. By now it's almost common knowledge that, if you value your privacy, Facebook is not a place you should be spending time.
What is surprising, is the ridiculously low cost. This indicates that there is an abundance in supply of Facebook profiles and those who collected addresses are beginning to sell their data cheap. Serious marketing people may not find much value in these data sets as they do not allow specific targeting, but then we have to realize that the data is available for just $5.
Such offers may come down much more to a privacy and security problem for cheesy email marketing, and malicious activities such as spamming and phishing.