Video Film Town Oy, d/b/a FilmTown (www, biz reg) is spamming Finnish businesses with “hints for biz Xmas presents”. Their partner in spam is Panic Marketing Oy (whose Sales Group Manager recently had a rather futile attempt at spam-apologist conversation with SendGrid…), with an address list that was purchased from Digimediatoimisto Haikuu.
These spams have been seen in addresses found in emaildump.txt, the Finnish equivalent of the Millions CD and the bestest address source around. Others have spotted it before me.
Cima Oy, d/b/a Restaurant Vanha Kalasatama (www, biz reg) has been spamming since October 22. I mentioned it to their service provider on Oct 23, but I don’t think I got a response, not even an automatic one. There was more spam on Oct 26, and on Nov 1, nothing special about that, but today, Nov 22, they struck gold by including their entire address list visibly in the Cc: field. So I feel compelled to award them a Spammer Award of some kind.
Continuing his descent deeper into Spamland, my bestest friend Lateralus Enterprise / Tavoite Media is now advertising “try out a car free for a month”. The beneficiary of the campaign is nordic-car-testing.com, a “survey” carried out by Orville Media ApS, a Danish advertising agency with a poor reputation – googling them produces a number of hits to Finnish forum discussions where consumers feel they have been cheated by this group and the Consumer Ombudsman and the Digitoday magazine specifically warn against giving this group any information at all. There is even a dedicated page by a Danish person that mentions them. A particularly nice touch (and proof of “descent into spamdom” is the use of “emails.com” as the apparent address source, sender and reply-to – it’s a parked domain that’s registered to somebody in China and may well never have had any involvement with Lateralus Enterprise.
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In a recap of their last year’s efforts, Panic Marketing Oy is spamming again to advertise Nordic Business Forum 2013 (also available in English). Their efforts seem to have begun on November 15, 2012.
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Earlier this summer I noted a growing number of spamtrap hits from U.S. department store Macy’s. I was about to blog about it when Spamhaus beat me to the pitch and listed them in the SBL. As I recall, they were in and out of the SBL two or three times before the spam from them died down. Unfortunately that did not last; they are once again hitting my spamtraps. It’s just a couple now, but if the previous pattern is repeated, they are headed for more trouble with Spamhaus, Returnpath, and private blocks as well. The ESP is Epsilon, via its subsidiary Bigfoot Interactive.
Tradeinn.com, which I blogged about twice last year (here and here), is still sending bulk email to the same long-closed email address as it did last October and November. The ESP for all of these web sites is Emailvision.
Possibly following a certain difficulty in sending spam from their own IP address range, Fonecta have entered into a strategic business partnership with Ixonos (a Finnish provider of IT services). Now Fonecta spam is being sent from the Ixonos cloud instead as of mid-September 2012 or so.
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This has been going on for a long time. I think I started receiving it in April 2012. I opted my own biz address out of it during the summer, but I continue to see the same spam in spamtraps. It was also discussed on a Finnish LinkedIn group. Some of the spamtraps constitute outdated and erroneous personal information, the processing of which is completely illegal under Section 9, Paragraph 2 of the Personal Data Act. There is no indication of the address source, but certain key facts suggest it might be Bisnode or one of the other more international players who deal in Finnish leads.
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Regus Finland Oy, my old friend (see previous posts 1, 2, 3, 4) are spamming to sell their temp office facilities. As with the other post today, I saw this in an address harvested from the web page of the biz, and have seen it in spamtraps as well. The ESP is the French Edatis, an acquaintance of mine from a very, very long time ago in this sordid context.