Verizon Wireless, one of the largest U.S. mobile phone carriers, today sent bulk email advertisements to at least a half dozen of my spamtraps. The only possible explanation that I can come up with for this number of spamtrap hits is a purchased list. The ESP is *of course* Yesmail, a subsidiary of Infogroup, which appears to specialize in bulk email for companies who don’t care whether they spam or not.
A few years ago I gave a tagged email address to The Home Depot for some warranty paperwork. About a year later, that address made it into the wild. At first I thought it was the big brands as usual selling off email addresses, but then learned through the type of spam I was receiving that it was stolen. I’ve contacted The Home Depot once or twice, but haven’t received one reply. Now today, The SCOOTER Store is spamming that same tagged email address via a marketing agency called Digital Marketing Direct (domain gaigelein.in).
Alurium, Inc., a cloud computing and web hosting company, sent a bulk email advertisement for a webinar to a number of spamtraps today. None of these spamtraps had ever heard from Alurium before, at least not since exiting their timeout periods and being turned into spamtraps. The ESP is Sendgrid.
This post is Part 2 in a series of two. OMICS Group are not content to spam through an ESP; they’re also spamming under bioprovider.com, a Domain by Proxy.
This spammer is an old acquaintance here. They’re still spamming through Benchmark, who haven’t reacted to the previous post. This one was brought to their attention in an abuse complaint as well. This post is Part 1 in a series of two; OMICS are using multiple channels to spam.
An outfit that calls itself Informed Store, a marketer to third-party lists, is spamming spamtrap email addresses that did not opt in to their email or email from any other bulk sender. The email appears to have been sent on behalf of the Welsh government, and is partly in Welsh. The ESP is Lyris, also known of as Uptilt.
Sometime last week Sony Mobile, the cell phone subsidiary of Sony Corporation, started spamming several of my spamtraps, some of them email addresses that have been closed for years, and some email addressees that never existed at all. The spam dribbled out, two or three per day, until today. Today they hit over two dozen spamtraps that they had not emailed previously. Their ESP is Acxiom Digital.
Autodesk, the manufacturer of 3D design software, is ignoring repeated opt-outs and consequently mailing an outdated and erroneous address in violation of Section 9, Paragraph 2 of the Personal Data Act, and sending unsolicited commercial email to an address that has opted out, violating Sections 26-27 (depending on how you interpret the nature of the target address; it is that of a natural person, but it could be argued the address owner used to receive this mail as a function of their job description) of the Act on the Protection of Privacy in Electronic Communications. They’re doing their own bulking.