It’s still unclear how he did it, but a businessman from Texas appears to have gotten hold of the Durango Chamber of Commerce’s broadcast email list.
On Monday, several members notified the chamber about an email sent by Marvin Crow, which went out Sunday carrying the subject line: Referral from Durango Chamber of Commerce.
“We must have been hacked,” Chamber Executive Director Jack Llewellyn said. “We do not ever sell or give out our email list. And we use Constant Contact, so no one could use the ‘Reply All’ function and get the addresses that way.”
After chamber staff sent an email to Crow asking how he got the email list, he responded with a meandering email about some gentlemen in Pagosa Springs saying he needed to make more contacts in Durango for his customized bottle openers and key chains. He didn’t answer the question.
Crow, who included his email, website and telephone numbers in the email, did not respond to a phone call from the Herald asking the same question.
“We do sell mailing or physical addresses, but we never, ever sell the email addresses,” Llewellyn said. “Even when we were doing a study with Fort Lewis College, we didn’t give them the addresses but sent the surveys out to our members ourselves.”
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