Although the names have been removed to protect the guilty and innocent, I received this:

Hi,

My name is Amy and I’ve been using your page: … to do research for a presentation I’m putting together. As a prelaw major, it was very helpful to me.

Sorry to take any more of your time, but I wanted to let you know of a link (…) on the page above that doesn’t work. And as a thank you, I thought I’d suggest a replacement/additional resource for it. I’ve been using this other page: … and it has a lot of information on the brain (i.e. functions, disorders, injuries, etc) that might be useful to you.

Thanks Again,

So, just a polite email telling me I have a broken link, until I saw this:

Hi Lisa,

My name is Beverly and I wanted to provide feedback on your page: … I was using it to do research for a lesson plan on earthquakes and as an Earth Science teacher, I’ve found it to be a tremendous help, thank you.

I figured I’d take a minute to return the favor. I noticed you have a broken link here: (…), so I thought I’d recommend another page for you. I’ve been using this page: … and it’s a great source for plate tectonics offering good information and extensive academic links which I really appreciated and wanted to pass along.

Thanks again,

It is at least a clever scam: Identify websites with high page rank (the site I got this on is very authoritative as it’s had a very long life, with the webmaster being especially sharp at keeping continuity on the site organization over multiple iterations to ensure good search engine ranking on relevant terms), find broken external links, and get them to change your bad link to their good link and give them link authority.