Many email verification and lead generation services act a lot like snowshoe spammers. They bounce around from host to host, hoping to avoid detection and suspicion caused by their unusual SMTP traffic.
Below is another example of B2B spam sent by a large, legitimate company, this time by Oracle. This spam was sent to a pristine spamtrap that follows the format of normal email addresses at the company in question, but does not actually belong to the person that received the spam. Unlike the IBM B2B prospecting spam I reported a few days ago, Oracle sent this spam from its ESP, the Oracle Marketing Cloud.
NOTE [5/19/2017]: An Oracle representative notified me that the IP address that sent the spam is NOT part of the Oracle Marketing Cloud, although that IP belongs to Oracle.
Would you buy accounting services from somebody whose hand is already in your pocket? I wouldn’t, either. Rule #0: Spam is theft.
The winner this time is Mr Ville Ryynänen, of Ryynänen Consulting OÜ (see corporate and personal LinkedIn profiles; corporate website, inforegister B2B info), who asks Finnish owners of Estonian corporations whether they are happy with their current accountants and if they wouldn’t like to switch.
During August 2015, and possibly earlier, the Swedish provider of lightweight card payment solutions, iZettle, has enlisted the services of Roy Knows Best, also known as Salesleads Scandinavia AB, for their advertising.
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Some time ago, a new spam list vendor came to our sights. They are suomitotal.com (anonymized domain registration) and they are mailing out of Elastic Email, selling B2B lists for spamming, predictably by spamming.
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A unidentifiable investment solicitation spammer using an anonymous free GMail address (germany.bestinvest@gmail.com) just emailed to a purchased or email appended list. The list includes two role accounts originally scraped from a website and Whois. I registered the domain for those accounts in the 1990s, and am the only registered owner that domain has ever had. Neither spammed email address *ever* sent email to anybody; they only received email. The ESP was YourMailingListProvider.
Nigerian tabloid site Pulse.ng has been emailing over 100 of my spamtraps daily for months. Enough of the spamtraps are pristine spamtraps that they must have purchased a list or hired an email appender. (Unless they scraped the list themselves, no other explanation makes sense.) Their ESP is EMarSys.
Florida-based real estate sales firm International Sales Group (ISG) is emailing a list that contains almost a dozen of my spamtraps. Most of those spamtraps were email addresses at real estate firms that went bankrupt between 2008 and 2011. ISG is either emailing a list that they have not contacted in years, or they bought a list or hired an email appender. Their ESP is Vertical Response, whose abuse department appears to have gone AWOL sometime in 2014.
Transportation management consulting company Ahern & Associates, which appeared on the Mainsleaze blog once already, is emailing a large number of spamtraps, at least a half dozen of which are non-typoed pristine spamtraps. This time, they are emailing through ESP Vertical Response, which has been completely unresponsive to spam complaints for the past few months.
Today clothing retailer Coldwater Creek emailed about a dozen spamtraps with a sales announcement. About a third of those spamtraps were probable typos. Several others were repurposed spamtraps, some of them not live for well over a decade. One was a pristine spamtrap at a domain that has never had a legitimate email address. The ESP was the Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SMC), previously known of as ExactTarget.