The Data Protection Ombudsman has decided that ACC Consulting Oy cannot be brought into line with advice and guidance alone, and has passed the matter on to the Data Protection Board with a requirement to impose a conditional fine to ensure compliance.
ScienceSoft Oy, apparently of Annankatu 2 A 2, 00100 HELSINKI, tel. +358-45-178 4880, contact@scnsoft.fi, www.scnsoft.fi are spamming. The spam has zero text content, only a 24-page PDF, so it’s illegal because it does not indicate where the addresses were obtained from, it does not have an unsubscription method, it does not identify the sender adequately, etc. etc.
The spamming IP is in Belarus, as is the mothership of this supposedly Finnish company. They started spamming in April 2013, but I seem not to have written them up at the time.
Received: from gw-mail.scnsoft.com (gw-mail.scnsoft.com [93.84.113.149])
This was sent in private email on Feb 12 in response to a spam. No response has been received so far.
Aboma Control Oy (www, biz reg, responsible people) is using spam to advertise its accounting services. The spam says they are using a purchased list from Suomen Asiakastieto Oy. I received a copy of this spam at my business and saw it in spamtraps that qualify as outdated and erroneous personal information (the processing of which is illegal).
The ESP is Hurja Solutions Oy (hurja.fi, e-viesti.fi, qred.fi; www, biz reg, responsible people) whose web pages do not contain anything on the topic of acceptable use.
Read more…
In a blog post titled Email Segmentation Without User Data, MailerLite, aka UAB “Itema”, are putting forth the view that you should be “segmenting” by sending your contacts more email about the same basic idea with different subject lines to see which email performs the best.
Now this doesn’t really address the point of whether you’re sending by permission or without it, and of course MailerLite’s policies (ToS, privacy policy and anti-spam policy) read just fine, but our previous experiences with MailerLite suggest that even their own idea of what is acceptable may not be quite as highbrow as put forth in those documents.
Discussion on several anti-spam mailing lists is currently centering on the topic of how to best avoid MailerLite pre-emptively in its entirety, by IP, domain name, shoe size and other relevant parameters…
A little bird told me that the Asiakkuusmarkkinointiliitto (“Customership Marketing Association”, for lack of an official translation) (www, biz reg, register of associations) has posted an anonymous opinion piece that basically says they think spamtrapping is illegal.
Suomalainen Kirjakauppa (www, biz reg), one of Finland’s largest bookstores (and oldest registered businesses) has been terminated previously by a Finnish ESP, and by a Swedish ESP operating in Finland, both for the use of bad data that hit spamtraps and landed their IPs onto blocklists. It is very likely that they aren’t deliberately spamming B2C (though it must be said that B2B spam that is guaranteed to be spam has been seen from them too), but by steadfastly refusing to clean bad/old/bad and old data from their legitimately acquired B2C lists, they have degenerated into spammers.
Panic Marketing, the subject of the now defunct SBL168245, have been lying low for a bit, but are active again. And were noticed by the right people.
The people behind Acc Consulting Oy appear to have set up a new business, Justin Perintä Oy (www, biz reg, people responsible), to branch into debt collection, and predictably, started using their time-honoured methods to advertise their services.
As usual, their Internet service providers, Saunalahti (a d/b/a of Elisa Plc), Kotisivut.com, and Nebula are doing their damnedest to turn a blind eye.
In early December 2013, the Denver Code Monkey posted a blog note about this spammer in the spammer section of his blog. Ignacio de Marco, apparently of BairesDev LLC, San Francisco / Argentina had been spamming him. We confirm – this happened to me too.