Siltaraha Oy / Finlandia Finance Oy
In May 2016, a Finnish B2B financing company (or “payday loans for businesses”, if you like) called Siltaraha Oy (www, biz reg, people responsible) started advertising its activities in B2B spam to purchased lists.
As can be seen from the biz reg, the company was only founded in January 2016. At the time, the only person who seemed to have anything to do with it was a lawyer called Petri Hietalahti, also of LexPoint Oy (biz reg, people responsible).
Siltaraha got promptly thrown off of MailChimp for the spam and only a few days later got new quarters at the domestic ESP Emaileri and continued spamming from there for months, even years.
Between mid-July and end of August 2016 yours truly and Mr Hietalahti had some really amusing (for my part) conversations that basically ended with him threatening both legal and unspecified other-than-legal consequences if I continued to mention him anywhere, such as in my LinkedIn updates about the matter. Mr Hietalahti also registered the domain names suomispam.fi and suomispam.com maliciously; he allowed them to drop after the initial registration period, it seems, with the .fi now being in Suomispam DNSBL hands and the .com belonging to a commercial domain hoarder.
Under its alias Finlandia Rahoitus (technically a separate company, www, biz reg and people responsible), Siltaraha tried B2B spamming to purchased lists from the Swedish ESP Apsis, who were slightly slower than MailChimp, but eventually arrived at the same result: termination because of AUP violation, making Finlandia Finance Oy yet another customer of Emaileri.
This continued until late February 2018. Then Emaileri gained religion, maybe as a result of the impending GDPR, maybe as a result of the corporate takeover last fall, who knows; Siltaraha spam ended, and so did a lot of other Emaileri spam.
Until now, when they started again, from the Lithuanian ESP MailerLite, who won’t take more than a day or two doing what MailChimp and Apsis already did.
Meanwhile, Petri Hietalahti has disappeared from LinkedIn and from the boards and other positions of technical responsibility of Siltaraha Oy and Finlandia Finance Oy. However, he still acts as the Data Protection Officer of said companies… while they continue to send B2B spam violating the GDPR.