Slashdot Mirror
Spammer Hangout's Membership Roster Left Exposed
MikeCapone writes "According to an article at Wired News, spammers feel the need to be part of a community too. The Bulk Club is one such community. A message on the site states that it offers, for a $20 monthly fee, a variety of how-to articles, spamming software, a members' message board area, and 300,000 FRESH e-mails/week. Unsurprisingly, the 'Law & Ethics' section is 'Members Only.' The good part is that, because of a glitch, the membership list of this charming organization was left exposed on the website."
I'd be interested in seeing the list of bulk friendly isp's :)
From the article:
In an e-mail interview, Auman said that the club was dedicated to promoting "responsible" business practices and that it offers information about misleading tactics used by some spammers simply to show why they are improper.
Now, I hate spam and spammers with a passion, but I must admit that the subject lines and stuff I've been getting recently are a lot more appropriate. At least the spam I get, they aren't trying to hide it anymore with stuff like "Re: Your bank account" or "Re: Tech support" and it's about debt management or a second mortgage or my wang. Too bad that their "responsible business practices" include articles about spoofing (probably about spoofing emails and forging headers) and harvesting emails ("opt-in" my ass).
But anyways... down to the real reason I posted. Did anybody manage to get any info about addresses, telephone numbers, etc? I have a baseball bat and some free time in the mornings before work... and late nights are free too! DId I mention I live in Florida, just like this guy:
Among the Bulk Club's list of 159 "active members" was Damon Decrescenzo, one of the operators of Rockin Time Holdings, a Florida junk e-mailer sued by Microsoft in June and by Amazon this month.
I have responsible business practices too! I am responsible for alot of death and destruction...
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
It's pretty involved, but there was an expose in one of the media outlets a few weeks ago about this very thing. Basically a reputible company outsources its marketing to a firm. That firm is partially comp'd on how much traffic they drive. Now all good companies do due diligence and would never hire some PR firm that spams. So the PR firm outsources to someone else who does the same until the get to one of the big time spammers. With each step down the ladder, the companies get more and more sleazy. The linkage is so diluted at that point, it's hard for anyone to tell who requested the spam's to be sent on the original company's behalf.
A company like Symantec can easily say 'my gosh, I can't believe it. we'll talk to our vendor right away.' vendor says 'we had no idea out sub contractor was a spam supporter - we've terminated our relationship with them' and no one has dirty hands.
Forget "Don't send" lists.
To enforce industry responsability do a national "must include" list.
Liccens spammers AND every spammer must be on the must include list AND spam to everyone on the must include list.
Here is where the fun begins.
Also on the must include list are spam scounts that track the latest spam to update spam filters.
But it get's better.
Also added to the list is fedral observers who check up to be sure all spam is being sent to the must spam list.
As a member of the must spam list you can opt out IF the spammer honnors the opt out system. Of course opt out to be required.
Fedral agents will randomly test opt outs, randomly test the list.
and the e-mail address given for the "must spam" list must be actively read by the spammer. A fedral agent will occasionally contact the spammer at the address to be sure the spammer is still reading his e-mail if not he must pay a hefty fine and repeated offenses msy cost him his liccesn.
This should inspire spammers to police themselfs quite well and do something about the worst spam tactics.
I don't actually exist.
Spammers deprive me of a fair way to defend myself. I don't like being put in a position where I break my own moral code to fight them off, but by their method of attack they have taken away my ability to fight them fairly.
:)
War fought in this way on these grounds is justified, yet I may still feel a little guilty when I look at their (servers') smoking remains.
I hate people like this all the more because they give me only two choices: lose, or denigrate myself and win.
I hope this explains a little better why people here hate spammers SO MUCH.
(unless I've been trolled
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
From their site.
The Bulk Club does not promote any portion of this site via bulk email period. It is against our hosting providers terms of service to do so and we will not tolerate anyone who abuses these rules on our web site
How Ironic.
An interesting point, but flawed.
These people aren't political dissidents. They're criminals, and they're perpetrating crimes against ME! Furthermore, the data is a list of the members of a willful collusion. The very fact that they're on this list defines that they are actively, and deliberately trying to commit crimes against me and others.
It's not a level playing field. I'd have sympathy for AA members, even if some of them had caused harm by drunk driving. I have no sympathy for people who gather to discuss and plan how best to commit crimes. I would have no sympathy for an online thieves guild (real thieves, not for games), or a collection of pedophiles who are trying to legitimise their actions.
How much do you pay per month for your internet access? ~30% of that is because of spammers. If you're paying $30/month, then every year you have had $120 stolen from your person by these people.
Do we provide safe harbor to unrepentant criminals? Not in my house, and not on my internet!
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
How many of the "memebers" are actually anti-spam people sniffing around to see who the spammers are? Then again, most fo the anti-spam community is smart enough to use a throw away e-mail address for this sort of thing.
:
Seriously - to help eliminate the innocent bystander from the spammer who needs to be whacked , start by sending an e-mail.
To: Direct Marketing Vendor
From: Important Sounding Title
cc: legal@fakedomain.com
Dear Sir,
I need you to help me kick off my marketing campaign by sending my message out to 31 million targeted clients. I will pay you 150,000 USD for this service. If you are interested, then please send your company name, a contact name, phone number and address so that I can have a contract drawn up. We will also need to have the name of your bank, and the address of the branch that you use for our contract as well. Please no account numbers, we only need to get the bank name and branch!
Sincerely,
bigcheese@fakedomain.com
Important Sounding Title Goes here
Wait for reply - post reply to slashdot/usenet/etc
include all e-mail headers and or phone
conversations
Constantly remind people that
A. No one will protect your from these spammers
B. No one will help you pay for the damages they cause.
C. No one will give you back the time that SPAM has wasted in your life.
Show up at the eventual fire with a can of gasoline.
Now go off half cocked, see if I care!
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
I was thinking a better approach would be to slip their email addresses into comments on a webpage. With the way my websites are set up, a change to one file would get the list sent out with each page on that site...it'd be trivial to include a block like this:
<!-- Spambots, chew on this:
...
foo@bar.com
joe@spammer.com
-->
Addresses in mailto links are obfuscated so that the spambots won't get them...these, of course, would be left alone.
Now...does anyone have the list of spammers extracted from this site? I found real names in an archive linked through the Wired article, but no email addresses. :-|
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Speaking of spam, yesterday I submitted a story to /. which was published. Unfortunately, I was stupid enough to include my email address in the story. Today I had over 100 virus' and spam sent to me, whereas in the last 3 months of using the address, I have had 0 spam. Just a warning to anyone else who wants to submit an article. I also wrote an email to Rob about this asking that a warning be put on the submission page about using email addresses on the site.
If you like Mailinator, check out a program I recently wrote called Nator - it uses Mailinator as a backend and it can scrape the email on mailinator.com and send it to your home email address. It also does some cool things with random usernames. Details here. It's free, written in Java, and is open source (or will be once we're out of the beta phase) Brian
Are you a Candy Addict?