Regus (International Workplace Group plc)
Spamming through SendEthic this time, targeting addresses stolen from other companies.
In January 2022, I discussed a potential consultant assignment with a company somewhere. Being my own Internet Service Provider with unlimited email aliasesa, I am in the habit of generating dedicated addresses for many different purposes. That’s what I did this time, too. I generated an alias that identifies this other company, and proceeded to use it exclusively in my communications with them.
The consultant assignment didn’t happen. The alias remained on the email server, dormant, seeing no use at all after the initial conversation.
Until June 2023. At that point, multiple companies that do email verification started pounding it. All of their efforts were for naught; they were all blocked on the server anyway. So you come in and plan to say “Hi, I’d like to talk to you about Jesus”, but unfortunately for you I don’t care if you’re selling firewood, or introducing me to your latest version of Jesus, or telling me that my cat seems to be stuck up a tree nearby – I already recognised you and told you to go pound sand before you had even gotten started with your actual message of the day.
So, you’d think all of the verifiers would have reported it to their customers that this one is no good. Naah, in September 2023 it started receiving spam from a variety of senders both foreign and domestic that really were very varied and only had one thing in common: none of them were related in the slightest to the original company for whom the alias was generated.
Come February 2026. Regus, who have been mentioned on this site as spammers as far back as 2014, decided to join the merry band of thieves trying to send their unwanted email marketing to this address whose existence should be fully unknown to anyone else but the originally mentioned recruitment company.
Waiting to see what SendEthic’s reaction will be – the Ethic in the name ought to make the would-be complainant rather hopeful, but their AUP (Conditions generales de vente) leaves the reader rather unsure about their unequivocal forbidding of all spam and the use of purchased lists.