Aug
27

Bestbiit/Bluebiit: Illegally spamming to advertise electronic gadgets

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!

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Jul
29

(RESOLVED) Suomen Yrittäjäpalvelut: Selling electronic cigarettes to spamtraps

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.

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Jul
17

Panic Marketing: Harvesting personal information from the Internet to spam

Panic Marketing Oy (see biz reg), who are an old acquaintance here, are spamming natural persons whose addresses they confess to having harvested from “public sources on the Internet” with ads for cell phones and plans from Elisa, who used to be known as Helsinki Telephone Co. However, the sender and the beneficiary are not identified in the message. The apparent sender domain, which also hosts the unsub facility, is registered through Domains by Proxy. How much more can you fail?
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Jul
17

SH-Group Oy d/b/a Data Media Gazelle / kuriero.fi: Yet another small-time spammer for hire from Finland

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.

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Jun
01

Push Marketing: Blatantly disregarding opt-out

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.

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May
07

Advanstar: When in doubt, diversify

Not that it’s very useful. Yesmail is still just as Yesmail as before.

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May
01

Cellectis SA: Still spamming scientists

Cellectis SA, an old acquaintance on this site, continues to spam scientists, which is not altogether very surprising given EmailVision’s rather lackluster response the last time around. We hear there’s a new guy in town (manning abuse@, that is), so let’s see.

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May
01

Mettler Toledo: Spamming scientists

Mettler Toledo, a global provider of precision instruments and weighing equipment, wishes to reach out to scientists whose addresses they must have harvested from scientific articles available via PubMed. The ESP is Eloqua.
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Apr
11

VWR International Oy: Selling …what? to spamtraps and scientists

VWR International Oy (see biz reg), d/b/a Kebo Lab, the Finnish branch of VWR International LLC, is spamming, and doing it on their own.

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Apr
11

On using purchased lists

I recently googled the words can I use a purchased email list and just had to share MailChimp‘s brilliant take on the topic. Yeah, I know it’s pretty old and predates this log by a year or three. Looking at the Finnish B2B spam my traps receive, practically all of which is sent to lists sold by the so-called reputable players Fonecta, Eniro, Asiakastieto, JM Tieto, and of course the drive-by-night yahoos such as Suomen Markkinointirekisteri Oy, Digimediatoimisto Haikuu (“Haiku”), Bisnesrekisteri.com aka Lateralus Enterprise d/b/a Tavoite Media whose primus motor objects to being named and has enlisted the help of the Data Protection Ombudsman’s office to have his name stricken from this post, and Yrityspostia.fi aka Suunnittelutoimisto Jotain… aka Janne Laitinen, I felt compelled to mention this – if only so that (at least any responsible international) ESPs reading this would know that if their Finnish customers mention any of the above in their mails, they’re using a purchased list.

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