AAA: "Your hotmail.com account is sending spam messages. Would you like any assistance?"

Scenario: You have a hotmail.com email address, your account gets hacked and starts sending spam emails without your knowledge. Would it be strange if AAA was receiving those messages and instead of AAA blocking the email address entirely, a AAA employee looked up the email address, found the phone number and then called and notified the AAA member that their account is sending spam messages. How would you feel if a company reached out and helped you stop sending annoying spam?

I started receiving email messages recently from a hotmail.com address the message kept stating:

"AAA This is a perfect opportunity to be your own boss i have made more in a week than most people do in a year this really is a way to satisfy all your needs if you are truly tired of working your dead end job do this your dreams are always be within reach"

I was seconds away from forwarding the message to our IT Tech group to have them blacklist the email so I can stop seeing this annoying email message 3x's a day from the same hotmail.com e-mail address. Just before I submitted it to IT, I had thought what if this hotmail.com email address was a AAA member?

Most spam messages that come into businesses are actually real e-mail addresses that are used by real people but they have no idea that their account is being secretly hacked and sending spam messages. So instead of sending the message to IT to deny all future emails from coming into AAA firewalls I thought I would do a search in our databases for the email address.

Sure enough, I found a AAA Member, who has been with AAA for over 6 years, I gave the member a call and left the following voicemail:

Hello, My name is Steve Douglas from AAA Arizona. I am calling you regarding a unique issue, recently AAA has been receiving some emails that appear to be spam from your hotmail.com account. You may or may not be aware of this already but I'd like to offer you my assistance in getting your account cleaned so it stops sending spam messages. I am an IT professional and can give you some easy steps to see if it help's stop sending spam messages. You can give me a call, my direct line is ...-...-....

After calling, I felt a bit odd about calling and notifying the member. The only reason though I felt odd is because it's unique, companies don't do this today. Though I had to weigh my options, do we blacklist and essentially "mute" the member or do we notify the member and give them steps so we are both happy.

For the time being I setup a rule in my mailbox to move any messages from this member's hotmail.com email address into a folder. I hope to hear from the member so I can stop the spamming but most imporantly, what would you have done? Weigh your options and decide, would you have called or blacklisted the email address all together?