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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."
Maybe they'd be interested in some anti-spam software.
Make no mistake, my aim will prove true. I should have this whole "spam" ordeal cleared up by late September.
*as a side note, it wouldn't hurt to sign up and learn how your enemy thinks, and how he employs his tactics. Before you gun him down like a dog in the street, that is.
What's the difference between these remarkle advertising vehicles? Don't be left without the proper knowledge when sending out your offering to the masses. Along with our other various How Tos, learn the difference before any mailing.
I have never felt so good to be part of the Slashdot effect.
BTW, as pointed to in the article, a list of members was posted to Usenet w/a list of memberships. There was also a link to an archive of the contents of the site; here's a link:
http://jscript.dk/2003/8/thebulkclub.com.zip
and a mirror:
http://saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com/thebulkclub.co m/thebulkclub.com.zip
A list of the files in the archive can be found here:
http://saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com/thebulkclub.co m/contents.txt
Grab a copy and post your own links!
Carousel is a lie!
They're not /.ed yet. You call that clicking?
Agony, pain, burning, acid
Slow death too good for spammer
May spam penis shrink
You know, snooping around a spammers site looking for open files is really fighting abuse with abuse and .. *sporf!* I can't keep typing this without busting a gut! Bwahahaha!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
one of those ubiquitous email harvester bots ran into the exposed membership list :)
The bold print giveth, and the fine print taketh away
Hey, I love their little notice:
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.
The club for spammers hates spam???
Rooting for the yankees is like rooting for herpes.
That popup window says we can join their mailing list for FREE!
*signs up his boss*
In my feverish anticipation of the hunt, I got my math wrong. You can see how anxious I am to get started on my righteous campaign.
Be vewy vewy quiet, I'm hunting spammers.
This popup appeared.
"The Bulk Club Mailing List
Join our mailing list for FREE!
Bulk Email Industry News Alerts
Free Tips & Tricks
Updated Bulk Club News
and more..."
Now how stupid do they think we are?
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.
One word: Putty.
http://www.spamhaus.org/
Regardless,
I beg your pardon?
This is the Network that belongs to the People. These are the people that are abusing the network.
I don't have a sense of decency when it comes to dirty, nasty, polluters that break laws or attempt to break laws.
If it had been a list of alcoholics or political dissidents no one would have any business posting their names anywhere. This is a list of people who can each be charged with trespassing or attempted trespassing, and our government refuses to charge them with these crimes. Now I'm not saying I'M going to go vigilanti on their collective ass, but I'm more than willing to turn a blind eye to anyone who does.
Buttsex.
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.
A spammer is someone who comes to your house every day and rings the doorbell every 37 seconds. He makes it difficult for you to go outside because when you do, he'll pin advertisements for Viagra and get-rich-quick schemes all over your clothes. After a while, your mail carrier may not even show up at your house, for fear of this miscreant.
Spammers hide behind legalities, but they are profoundly immoral, in the sense that they don't give a damn about what their actions do to the larger community. The irony is that they are busy bringing down the very edifice that allows them to conduct these activities.
Alchoholics are sick people who can be cured.
Political dissidents may have views I disagree with, but they're not forcing me to listen to them.
Spammers are just people who don't give a damn about anyone else, and are willing to make money off of crippling a mechanism that millions of people depend on every day.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
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
After all, The First Rule of Bulk Club is, You do not talk about Bulk Club.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
Here you go:
This is the jackass that runs the site bulkclub.com
Drew Auman
The Bulk Club LLC
3867 W. Market St #272
Akron, OH 44333
330-666-7625
Last known home address from yahoo people search (the phone number matches from the contact on a whois on the site registration info):
Drew Auman
113 Hunt Club Dr
Copley, OH 44321-2759
330-666-7625
That prefix is quite fitting don't you think?
You've got an easy breezy wind at your back...most of the time.
Crap, forgot to include what the OP wanted. :D
I'll reply to my own comment anonymously so as not to whore.
Auman's email contact for bulkmail.com is: aumaninc@hotmail.com
aumaninc@aol.com is the one listed with yahoo.
"No, they're not. As long as they don't forge headers or falsely advertise (under the false advertising laws), they're not breaking the law."
Yes they ARE! Clearly, using an open mail relay is theft, no matter how irresponsible the mail admin is (and this is still how most spam gets sent today). However, even if they're not...
Your ISP is paying real amounts of money for bandwidth. Not dial-up or DSL connections, but really big pipes that they share amongst their subscribers. They're also paying for disk space to store their customers' mail.
Now if spam takes up 20% of their bandwidth and 40% of their mail spooler's disk space before they have an opportunity to filter it, who do you think pays for it?
You do. And I do. Our monthly costs are in effect renting a tiny fragment of the resources of the internet, and roughly a third of the internet is now spam. (email and newsgroups, which translates to bandwidth, time, computing power, and storage)
Spammers do NOT pay for their bandwidth! If they did, then spam wouldn't be a problem.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
It's a slow, quiet day - one of those where the afternoon drags on and on and on - so I log into Slashdot.
/.'ers will be indulging in at this very moment.
Bingo! A gaggle of spammers exposed to the public eye! I start scrolling through the discussion, my heart filled with glee at the wizard japes my fellow
Bzzzt! All that's there is several variations on a wget script, pointers to a few last-known home addresses, pointers to lists of users etc. All good, solid work, but nothing that's going to get you bonus marks.
Students, here's your work assignment for the next 30 minutes: I want to see Slashdot subjects like "Their hosting service has now lost power", "Just sent 50 tonnes of dung to this guy's home address", "Just ordered 5000 pizzas sent to this guy's house", "Server is now engulfed in flame - I've seen it!", "This guy's credit history has now been destroyed", "Hosting computer room now under 18 inches of water", and so on.
This assignment will form a SIGNIFICANT component of your end-of-year grade. Any references supplied will be checked; photographic evidence should be supplied where available.
Thanks for your attention, and good luck in your endeavours
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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