Epinion-pining?

Today I did the usual mundanee task of checking my email. Hardly exciting in any way. Along with the usual slew of nothing important, and some junk was an e-mail from Epinions.com. I've written a few Epinions of games I've played the ever living snot out of. The e-mail was a little fishy. Being recieved May 17th, 2005, it told me if I didn't log in before December 23rd, 2003, my account would be frozen and within a few month expired. I've recieved a good number of fraudulant e-mails for Ebay and Paypal recently, but having never recieved one from Epinions I thought maybe they might simply have screwed up. So in the interest in maintaining my reviews (which I've actually seen with others on stores selling the games) I went to the site itself (got to be careful of those e-mail links).

There wasn't any fanfare, I simply logged in and I was logged in. Nothing about expirations or anything.

Time goes on. I scrape more paint off the house, unclog a few toilets, eat some really great lasagna mom made, and fix some computer issues before once again, checking my email. To my suprise I recieved another e-mail from Epinions.com. What I thought as a confirmation e-mail of my logging in turned out to be another request for my logging in, lest my account freeze and expire. This time the date was May 23rd, 2004.

Again, I logged in and nothing really that spectacular happened.

I honestly didn't think that there could be any scammer out there dumb enough to, twice no less, put a date that has long since passed on an e-mail trying to get someone to log in somewhere. To asuade my doubts, I clicked the link that, hopefully, went to Epinions.com. The site I arrived at was Epinions.com. There couldn't be much doubt as to its authenticity, seeing as how it was complete with my review of Timesplitters 2 sitting nicely at the top of a list of them upon my querying.

Somehow, I have no idea how, in the long years I haven't written a darn thing for Epinions they completely forgot they were supposed to tell me about my impending doom. Sometime recently, some worker must have discovered this and said something to the effect of, "Holy crap!" followed by, "Maybe if I e-mail him these things a bunch he won't notice the dates."

That might have been the case, except I wasn't even a member until February 2004. Whatever would I be doing needing to log in sometime around December 2004 if I hadn't even made an account? Could Epinions have had foreknowledge of my coming? Scary.