An anonymous party appearing as b2b-mails.org is spamming on behalf of Vistaprint. Given the .pro registration, it looks like this is a Romanian party. It may be something closer to home, too.
Video Film Town Oy, d/b/a FilmTown (www, biz reg) is spamming Finnish businesses with “hints for biz Xmas presents”. Their partner in spam is Panic Marketing Oy (whose Sales Group Manager recently had a rather futile attempt at spam-apologist conversation with SendGrid…), with an address list that was purchased from Digimediatoimisto Haikuu.
These spams have been seen in addresses found in emaildump.txt, the Finnish equivalent of the Millions CD and the bestest address source around. Others have spotted it before me.
Cima Oy, d/b/a Restaurant Vanha Kalasatama (www, biz reg) has been spamming since October 22. I mentioned it to their service provider on Oct 23, but I don’t think I got a response, not even an automatic one. There was more spam on Oct 26, and on Nov 1, nothing special about that, but today, Nov 22, they struck gold by including their entire address list visibly in the Cc: field. So I feel compelled to award them a Spammer Award of some kind.
Continuing his descent deeper into Spamland, my bestest friend Lateralus Enterprise / Tavoite Media is now advertising “try out a car free for a month”. The beneficiary of the campaign is nordic-car-testing.com, a “survey” carried out by Orville Media ApS, a Danish advertising agency with a poor reputation – googling them produces a number of hits to Finnish forum discussions where consumers feel they have been cheated by this group and the Consumer Ombudsman and the Digitoday magazine specifically warn against giving this group any information at all. There is even a dedicated page by a Danish person that mentions them. A particularly nice touch (and proof of “descent into spamdom” is the use of “emails.com” as the apparent address source, sender and reply-to – it’s a parked domain that’s registered to somebody in China and may well never have had any involvement with Lateralus Enterprise.
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In a recap of their last year’s efforts, Panic Marketing Oy is spamming again to advertise Nordic Business Forum 2013 (also available in English). Their efforts seem to have begun on November 15, 2012.
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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.
Possibly following a certain difficulty in sending spam from their own IP address range, Fonecta have entered into a strategic business partnership with Ixonos (a Finnish provider of IT services). Now Fonecta spam is being sent from the Ixonos cloud instead as of mid-September 2012 or so.
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This has been going on for a long time. I think I started receiving it in April 2012. I opted my own biz address out of it during the summer, but I continue to see the same spam in spamtraps. It was also discussed on a Finnish LinkedIn group. Some of the spamtraps constitute outdated and erroneous personal information, the processing of which is completely illegal under Section 9, Paragraph 2 of the Personal Data Act. There is no indication of the address source, but certain key facts suggest it might be Bisnode or one of the other more international players who deal in Finnish leads.
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