Cruise Companies of the World Want My Mum!
It appears that the list that Celebrity Cruises is using has itself gone on a ramble. For the past few months my mother’s email address has been inundated with email advertisements for cruises from a number of firms. The most recent is an organization in Scottsdale, Arizona (go figure!) that calls itself Our Vacation Center. The ESP is ExactTarget.
The website at the domain ourvacationcenter.com consists of an image, with no clickable links. The domain used in the From: header, ourholidaycentre.com, is not registered at all–the domain does not exist. Ourvacationcenter.com is registered–to Our Vacation Store, which fortunately has an actual home page. Otherwise I might have mistaken the sender for a scam web site of the sort normally advertised in snowshoe spam.
Source IP: 68.232.205.77
Headers:
Received: from mta.e.ourvacationcenter.com (mta.e.ourvacationcenter.com [68.232.205.77])
by <redacted> (Postfix) with ESMTP id <redacted>
for <redacted>; Wed, 23 May 2012 <redacted>
Received: by mta.e.ourvacationcenter.com (PowerMTA(TM) v3.5r16) id <redacted>
for <redacted>; Wed, 23 May 2012 <redacted>
(envelope-from <bounce-<redacted>@bounce.e.ourvacationcenter.com>)
From: "1st4cruising" <1st4cruisingadmin@ourholidaycentre.com>
To: <redacted>
Subject: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Best_of_British_sailings_from_=A3399pp?=
Date: Wed, 23 May 2012 <redacted>
List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:leave-<redacted>@leave.e.ourvacationcenter.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
x-job: <redacted>
Message-ID: <redacted>
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="<redacted>"
Hi, Tom.
I’m the Senior Deliverability Consultant at ExactTarget. I just wanted to let you know that we’re investigating this issue.
I agree — the image only web page does look scammy. :/ What is it about the travel industry that seems to attract that kind of thing? I encountered travel scams in postal mail and by phone in the 1970s and 1980s, long before email was around. I can’t be sure that this is a scam, of course, but the signs indicate that it is at very least a company that isn’t making much effort to look legitimate, at least in its Internet presence. (Their main web site has a poor Web-O-Trust rating too.)
As you will see shortly, the travel spams to my mother are not just coming from ExactTarget. I can’t blog about some of them here because the senders appear to be snowshoe spammers, but I’m going to post a few from other companies using other ESPs.
Our Vacation Center is now urging my mother to join, or rejoin, their “Platinum Rewards Program” and win a free vacation.
Received: from mta.e.ourvacationcenter.com (mta.e.ourvacationcenter.com [68.232.205.77])
by <redacted> (Postfix) with ESMTP id BF8747C0056
for <redacted>; Mon, 11 Jun 2012 <redacted>
DKIM-Signature: <redacted>
DomainKey-Signature: <redacted>
Received: by mta.e.ourvacationcenter.com (PowerMTA(TM) v3.5r16) id <redacted>
for <redacted>; Mon, 11 Jun 2012 <redacted>
(envelope-from <bounce-10950_HTML-43008960-131846-1058413-0@bounce.e.ourvacationcenter.com>)
From: “Platinum Rewards” <myplatinumrewards@e.ourvacationcenter.com>
To: <redacted>
Subject: <redacted>, Reactivate and Receive a Complimentary Vacation!
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2012 <redacted>
List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:leave-<redacted>@leave.e.ourvacationcenter.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
x-job: <redacted>
Message-ID: <redacted>
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary=”<redacted>”
Pingback: The Case of the Traveling Email Address » MainSleaze
Just a bit more of an update on this one.
Since I didn’t have any specific addresses to inquire concerning, I asked our client to provide me with opt-in information for a random list of addresses in their account. They were able to provide me with at least plausible information for the origins of the addresses which I requested information concerning.