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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."
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.
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
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.
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
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