Acc Consulting Oy, our old friend (www, biz reg (note absence of email address…), responsible people) seems to be hell bent on spamming the living bejesus out of every business email address in Finland.
My favourite spammer boi and his trusty sidekick are at it again, advertising the services of the latter’s business, Getwin Oy (www, biz reg) via spam to the usual crapola of addresses, including ones that have already opted out >18 months earlier. Unusually, I’m only munging the links that could be clicked to “remove” this address from the spam below.
Being their usual smart selves, they registered microsoftemail.net to spam with. Let’s put it this way: stepping on the shoes of the giant in Redmond is not a smart move. At the very least, this has the makings of a UDRP case, but being done in a manner that makes it look like MS were involved in their spamming, I’d say the spammers are hoping to have a new one ripped.
An address on my namesake domain had apparently subscribed to this list back in the days of old (before August 31, 2009, which is when they abandoned the domain). They took their sweet time before using the list – the first incident I witnessed was on August 9, 2012. (Incompetents’R’Us #1)
Over three years into my ownership of a certain domain name that used to belong to a biz but now belongs to myself as a private person ever since Dec 29, 2009, I have now started to receive mails targeted at customers of Check Point Software. The recipient was related to the IT side of the previous owner, so it does make a certain amount of sense and probably isn’t straight out spam, but resurrecting a list after over three years of inactivity? Give me a break. Disregarding opt-out? I’m afraid that does make it spam.
Ouch. Ouch!!!! How many ways can you fail?
Read more…
No need for copy of any kind, as the message is the same as yesterday. Only the target address matters here, and that’s trivial to deduce. Headers below, anyway.
More spam just in from Regus Finland Oy despite my efforts to the contrary in March 2012, November 2011, October 2011, May 2011 and May 2010. Again, I called the local office, asking if I could speak to Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse as they are clearly in charge of list management as no competent human could possibly make this kind of error so many times in a row. After a round of WTFs, the helpful assistant took down the details and said I could also write to helsinki.lunahouse@regus.com about it (just like the previous one did), which I did, again, cc’ing the Data Protection Ombudsman, who will, in a few months, respond that since the marketing efforts are sent by the Luxembourg company, they have no standing in the matter. I also wrote to Gabriel to mention this, but got a response from other people in the biz.
Bestbiit Oy (see biz reg), d/b/a Bluebiit, a Finnish startup, is spamming to advertise its goods, and I already mentioned them in this capacity elsewhere. There is nothing inherently surprising about this. Their spams have no plaintext content, so they violate every item of the spam legislation (not being identifiable as marketing, not having a mechanism for removal, and not describing the address list used). Unfortunately the Helsinki City Marathon organisation allowed them on as a sponsoring vendor (so I got to tell them off to their face; “we remove everybody who complains” said the young man and probably believed it was OK to spam as long as you did; unfortunately it’s not even true that they would do that) and they’ve got our recent Olympic silver medalist as a promotional face, too. Shame, shame!
Godiva, legendary U.S. maker of fine chocolates, is leaving a very bad taste in my mouth because they do not respect customer opt-out from marketing emails. :/ I occasionally order from Godiva, usually to send a birthday or thank-you present to somebody. I have an account, with a tagged email address. When created, that account was opted out of all marketing emails whatsoever, as I almost always do. This time, because of previous issues with being re-added to Godiva’s marketing email list after placing an order, I phoned in the order. When giving it, I *explicitly* told the sales rep to ensure that my email address did not get added to any lists. Although Godiva sends transactional emails from their own IPs, marketing emails are sent via Acxiom Digital.
Markkinointitoimisto Push! Oy (a/k/a Push! Marketing Management Ltd, see also biz reg) are spamming, and are doing so illegally in several ways, including but perhaps not limited to violating a previously expressed opt-out.