More spam just in from the spammer at Lateralus Enterprise / Tavoite Media advertising the spam registers for sale at bisnesrekisteri.fi. Now the mails contain a disclaimer to say “This is an advertisement meant for companies that does not require prior consent according to law.” Well, it’s still spam, and it gets listed and otherwise treated as spam nonetheless.
The Data Protection Ombudsman doesn’t want me to say his name out loud, but surely I can continue to state that bisnesrekisteri.fi, which is owned by Lateralus Enterprise, is again involved in spam.
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Finnish spam with anonymized domain registrations, collaborators in India, spamming IP and hosting in Romania, target addresses outdated and erroneous personal ones from the Finnish Business Information System, legally required items on sender identification, address list source missing… Gee, I wonder who it is whose spam matches these characteristics? We’ll know soon enough if Directi agrees to de-obfuscate email-offer.org, I guess.
There really is nothing special to report. It’s Vistaprint spam as usual. The ESP has been informed after Vistaprint spammed my business’ web page address with this in the end of June, to zero effect. I really don’t know of a reason to accept any more mail from this block, except to collect spam evidence, of course.
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!
This is so far off the scale of mainsleaze it’s questionable if it bears to be mentioned here. But it was sent through a legitimate ESP (Sendgrid), and there appears to be a connection to a legitimate Finnish business, however concealed.
SH-Group Oy, also doing business as Data Media Gazelle, under the domain name kuriero.fi, is spamming addresses found on “public Internet pages and Fonecta Kohdistamiskone B2B” with ads for their spamming service. How anybody bothers setting up one in this day and age is beyond me. I wish you all could read their press release (only in Finnish), it’s got practically every item in Rhyolite Software’s excellent Spam Is That Which We Don’t Do list. I particularly like the argument that apparently spam is environmentally friendly.
Yet another cruise company is spamming my elderly mother’s email address offering deals on cruises: Global Voyages Group <globalvoyagesgroup.com>. I’ve blogged previously about the large quantities of cruise- and travel-related spam to Mum. At this point I am certain that her email address has been placed on a “targeted list”. The ESP is (once again) ExactTarget.
The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), about whom I already blogged a couple of weeks ago, has apparently added some more email addresses that did not opt-in to its list in the last couple of weeks and is spamming them. The ESP is still Salsalabs, the ESP side of liberal U.S. political activist group Wired for Change.
The Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education, a non-profit organization that promotes “education for sustainability” in K-12 classrooms, has sent unsolicited bulk email to a third-party list. The email addresses on that list were originally scraped from other non-profit organization web sites of all kinds, including many whose focus was completely unrelated to what the Cloud Institute does and promotes. The ESP is Your Mailing List Provider (YMLP), a smaller mostly self-service ESP with very little tolerance for spam.