May
26
Spamming Householders With “Property Tax Relief” Messages
Online Property Tax Appeal, a company that offers American householders assistance in persuading their local governments to reduce their property taxes, is hitting a spamtrap and a live employee address at a firm in the UK. (My company, as a matter of fact.) It scarcely seems needful to state that neither the spamtrap nor the UK resident employee asked to receive this email. The ESP is Real Magnet.
Source IP: 209.18.93.154
Headers:
Received: from mail154.magnet101.com (mail154.magnet101.com [209.18.93.154])
by <redacted> (Postfix) with ESMTP id <redacted>
for <redacted>; Wed, 23 May 2012 <redacted>
Received: from MAGNETMAIL1 (172.17.154.1) by mail154.magnet101.com id <redacted>
for <redacted>; Wed, 23 May 2012 <redacted>
(envelope-from <mmreturn@magnetdev.com>)
Date: Wed, 23 May 2012 <redacted>
From: "Online Tax Appeal" <customerservice@onlinetaxappeal.com>
To: <redacted>
Subject: Lower Your 2012 Fulton County Property Taxes
Sender: "Online Tax Appeal" <customerservice@onlinetaxappeal.mmsend.com>
X-TokenInfo-NoToken:
X-Bps1: <redacted>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="<redacted>"
Message-Id: <<redacted>@mail154.magnet101.com>
I spoke with the sales/account manager on Friday afternoon and we have a meeting with this customer on Tuesday. I will get to the bottom of this and educate the customer on how “not” to grow their list. I will also make sure that this list is purged and suppressed from our system. I’ll keep you posted.
-Chris
Hi, Chris. I took the weekend off til now (It’s a holiday weekend in the US), so I just saw this blog.
I have no doubt that this was spam; Tom of all people knows the difference between spam and legitimate bulk email. I am unconvinced, however, that this was spam from a legitimate company. Tom is from the UK, not the US. Just as I would be a bit out of my depth assessing a UK company that offered legal services, I suspect that he is when assessing a US company that offers legal services. In other words, I wonder if this was a legitimate company offering a legitimate product.
I took a look at the company’s web site, and was rather unimpressed. I suppose that this could be a legitimate business. However, it appears to be offering users the same sort of service that they might receive at much less cost from their own attorneys, or even less cost if they were to file a pro-se appeal in their local court. I am not a lawyer, but my nose twitches.