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Brightmail Denies "White List" Deal With Spammer
ThePretender writes "From the InfoWorld article: 'A spammer's claim to his clients that he had an agreement with anti-spam technology vendor Brightmail to not block his traffic was contradicted by Brightmail officials today.' From the sounds of it, Scott Richter (apparently a notorious spammer) might just be looking for some media attention, he even goes as far saying he has similar agreements with some major ISPs. Ouch! May the drama unfold..."
Spammers are always honest, arn't they?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
From optinrealbig.com front page:
OptinRealBig.com, LLC ("Optin") has been informed that the New York
Attorney General and Microsoft have announced a press conference for
December 18, 2003. Optin has not been informed by either Microsoft nor
the New York Attorney General as to what the purpose of the press
conference is. Through other sources Optin has been informed that the
purpose of the press conference is to announce that a civil complaint
has been filed alleging violations of New York law by numerous
defendants, including Optin and Scott Richter, its President. Optin and
Scott Richter vigorously deny any violations of New York law and ask
that their clients and friends make no decision regarding any liability
on their part until they have the opportunity to respond to any
allegations made against them. Neither Optin nor Scott Richter will
have any further comment regarding this matter until they have had the
opportunity to read and review the Complaint. Any inquiries regarding
this matter should be addressed to Optin's legal counsel, Linda Goodman
(619-233-3535). Ms. Goodman is currently out of the office and will not
be available for comment until December 19, 2003.
The name of the spammer in question is Scott Ritcher by the way...not Richert. I've been lucky enough to meet this guy and even stay at his half million dollar house in Westminster Colorado for a week. He's doing pretty well for himself if you count the house, the 3 car garage with a black Lexus SC430 and a matching LX470. But overall i'd have to say him and his company are a bunch of idiots. His so-called "partner" Dustin Parker (it says this in the spamhaus link) is a total idiot . When i worked for him, Dustin was a 16-year old middle school drop out. We smoked a couple blunts together. Complete idiot. Just goes to show it doesn't take intelligence to become successful. Of course Scott is only dragging Dustin along because Scott himself is clueless from a technical standpoint. I dunno what the point of this post was except that Dustin is an idiot and Scott isn't far behind him but Scott's making millions off of other idiots so i guess that says something.
Scott
I've got a deal with Microsoft and the big AV companies to not do anything about the email virus I'm about to let loose.
Enjoy suckers!!!
The problem is that anyone can create bogus emails, thereby masking their own identity. Well surely there is a technical solution to this, such as abandoning the current mail protocols to prevent people from submitting emails with fake identifying info, or from submitting emails from bogus IPs. But where is there any progress along these lines?
If it's true that Brightmail made no special deal with him, it looks like he could be prosecuted for consumer fraud as well as spamming. Indeed, his clients could presumably sue him too. If Brightmail did make a special deal with him, assuming that they advertise that they block spam, then they comitted consumer fraud. Somebody's in trouble here one way or the other.
The result of the Anti-Spam law will be more American jobs moving over seas or to disreputable neighbors.
That's like complaining that laws against kiddie porn mean that Americans are missing out on working in the lucrative kiddie porn industry.
Think about it. Once those jobs move over seas America will have even less power to constrain the pread of spam.
Once they go overseas, e-mail providers can just put country blocks in place (see blackholes.us) and the problem is solved. If those countries want to join in our reindeer games, then they can crack down on the spammers and the blocks will go away.
Corporate officials are not all the much more trustworthy, unless I see hard evidence either way this becomes a mute point. All goes down too who you trust more, companies out to get your money or individuals out to get your money. Best way to stop them getting it is to not have any money, which is working out just fine for me.
Seems like his address can be found here
Scott Richter
1333 w 120th Ave suite 101
Westminster CO 80234
Srich10195@AOL.COM
303-5509828
OR
Richter, Scott srich10195@al.com
SaveRealBig
p.o.box 21316
denver, co 80221
usa
303-428-3600
Francois Lavaste, Brightmail VP of Marketing, said in a statement provided the GripeLog, "I have personally verified, with the assistance of male members of my department, the ineffectiveness of products advertised by Mr. Richter." Other Brightmail executives were spending the holidays in Nigeria and were unavailable for comment.
I have written several times of a major spamming operation that is using major ISPs. This is the guy who has been paying MSN > 1Million / month (apparently, also, Yahoo and AOL, but I do not know what the amount or deal is there). MSN then was getting greedy and raised it to > 5Million. From what I understand several of the other spammers kept the deal, but this guy approached another major DSL company and offered 2Million / month. The interesting thing is that he wants IPs and bandwidth. The major companies do not try to shut down insecure servers becuase they locate them and then simply use those IPs. Later they can blame the client.
Most of the spam that everybody thinks is coming from overseas is not. It is here, but the large ISPs are willing to hide it for a large price.
But you need to realize is that the reason email works, on the global scale it does, is precisely because of that lack of authentication, and it's decentralized, open nature.
I'm not saying "it's impossible"... it's certainly not.. but the more layers of authentication, and the beurocracies needed to manage them, the less workably any system becomes.
His name is Richter, not Richert, which is clearly indicated in the links provided.
Michael, by definition you cannot call yourself an editor unless you actually edit the stories.
Am I the only one that sees the irony of this whole submission to slashdot because it was a post about a spammer pretending to have white list access and submitted by a pretender?
With variation from time to time, the rules that ALWAYS applies to spammers are[From news.admin.net-abuse.email]:
Rule #1: Spammers lie.
[(Proposed) Sharp's Corollary: Spammers attempt to re-define "spamming" as that which they do not do.]
Rule #2: If a spammer seems to be telling the truth, see Rule #1.
Chrissman's Corollary: A spammer, when caught, blames his victims.
Rule #3: Spammers are stupid.
Krueger's Corollary: Spammer lies are really stupid. Pickett's Commentary: Spammer lies are boring. Russell's Corollary: Never underestimate the stupidity of spammers.
I say see rule #1 when listening to a spammer.
AngryPeopleRule
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
*'A spammer's claim to his clients...*
I think that's the key phrase here. Apparently Scott is losing customers, and in order to retain them, or gain new ones, he has to tell clients he is "whitelisted". What reputable business would want to pay an email broadcast company, when that company is blocklisted. He couldn't possibly think to use this as a defence, saying that if Brightmail whitelists him, he must not be a spammer. But then again, from what I've seen regarding him, I wouldn't be surprised.
As far as I'm concerned, any business that uses Optin is just as sleazy as Scott.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
Even if spammers move their servers overseas, the people running the business here can be sued. Even if the spammer is completely overseas, they can still be sued. If a US company hires a spammer to spam, the US company can be sued.
Fight Spammers!
The biggest problem with the "I didn't opt in!" complaints is that spammers have gotten better and better at submerging the opt-in indication to a yes-defaulted checkbox within all sorts of websites and software. Once you have slipped up and comprimised your e-mail address this way, you've basically given that publisher permission to spam you and share your address with any other spammers they want to "partner" with.
Therefore, anti-spam laws will always have a hole that a truck can be driven through. Since proving that you've never accidently tripped over a "universal opt-in" is nearly impossible to do, successful prosecutions will be tough.
The only way we're ever going to fully kill spam is to abandon SMTP and get a better way to verify that e-mail really came from the claimed sender and leaves a valid return address...
Part of the reason to toss the name 'brightmail' around is because their product is awesome at stopping spam. The spammer is probably just trying to undermine brightmail's credibility.
You generally can't believe a thing the guy says. I know for a fact he doesn't have agreements with at least one of the carrier/ISP's he says he does, and that carrier has had problems with him off and on for years through a couple of their larger hosting customers.
Of course, just for saying this, he'll threaten to get his dad (who's a lawyer!) to come after me, except of course that he's a tax lawyer.
Out of spammers, this guy is the lowest of the low.
Use the "which is more probable?" principle: which is more probable? A anti-spam technology ruin itself by promising blocking spam and letting thousands of junk mail pass by becouse ti made a deal that will ruin it's bussiness or The goo'dam spammer is lying?
- no sig.
So more jobs leave the US, fewer of us have good jobs and the expendable income that accompanies said jobs, so we become less of a target for Spammers. As many have said, Spamming is profitable because consumers buy the products. No US consumers, no reason to spam the US. Market dies, so the product dies. Spam problem solved. I fail to see a downside to this.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
You're just feeding his notoriety by talking about him, obviously it's a stunt on his part.
Brightmail has so few false positives and allows so little spam through that any noticable continuous stream of spam caused by such an alleged "arrangement" between Ritcher and Brightmail would be bound to get noticed by savvy end users/administrators, if not Brightmail post-installation tech support.
Same with alleged "whitelists" at ISPs - enough people have eyes on MTA configs that there would be questions.
This is bullshit and I'm sorry Brightmail had to stoop to a public answer.
I was told by a friend of mine (mortgage broker) that his company stopped using ileads.com because they were getting too many "bad quality" leads.
It seems that some people are starting to fill out these forms and having the brokers contact them and then after taking all the contact information from the broker, they inform them that if they don't a) divulge the information of where they got the lead and b) agree to stop using companies that use SPAM to generate leads that they will hand their contact details to the foaming at the mouth public.
Is this legal ? Souds like sweet justice to me.
Me too, I concluded an agreement with this guy, about my Iron Bar(TM). Whenever I meet him, he lets me beat the hell out of him with my Iron Bar(TM).
Rumours are that I have agreements with other spammers too, they just love my Iron Bar(TM).
Iron Bar(TM), the ultimate solution to construtive talks with spammers.
Not only do some anti-spam software companies make deals with spammers (according to the article), but some also are among the worst spammers.
I talked to a few different anti-spam software companies over the last few months. With each of them, I told them that once we made the decision on which (if any) software to go with, I wanted absolutely no further phone calls or emails trying to sell me their product. We made our decision just over 3 weeks ago and informed the software venders.
Two weeks ago, I received a spam from one of the venders we didn't purchase from. (Yes, the software we decided on caught it, but still, it's the priniciple of the thing.) I followed their procedures to opt-out and also sent an email to the salesperson whose name and email address appeared in the email. I informed her that I told them that I wanted no emails from them trying to sell me their software. I explained how disappointed I was in them and asked to receive no further emails.
A few days later, I received another spam from them. This one was "signed" by a VP of the company. Again, I opted out and sent an email to the VP explaining the entire situation. I explained that I was beyond disappointed and was now getting angry. I demanded that I not receive another sales email from them and explained that if I did, I would be passing the word about their tactics to friends that might be in the market for such software.
Guess what? I got another one. This time, I called the salesperson I was dealing with and explained that I was going to tell everyone I know about how Intellireach is an anti-spam software company that spammed me, did not honor my request to not get spammed in the first place and also did not honor several opt-out requests when the requests followed the instructions in the spam.
But why is the rum gone?
Then if any spam filtering companies are whitelisting spammers, then go after the companies for fraud.
Fight Spammers!
For quite some time their filtering has been effective. Brightmail won't say how they do it, but human screening, and subsequent filtering of emails containing links to spamvertised domains seemed to be a part of it.
Lately I have just been spammed silly. Looking at the spams (what choice do I have) the same spamvertised domains are represented over and over. This had not happened in the past.
This spam continues after desperately hitting the "Report Spam" button (available on their webmail interface only).
This supports the theory that either ATT or their contract spam filtering with Brightmail are passing or inserting certain mails.
With this development, I am not inclined to extend this service contract with ATT. I will be certain to pass on this information when the contract is terminated.
I work for a Brightmail competitor, and I find Richter's claim of cutting a whitelist deal with Brightmail to be completely implausible. They wouldn't do anything like that for the same reasons we wouldn't do anything like that:
1) If they were ever caught (and they probably would be, because their software integrates with your MTA, which means someone could reverse-engineer it or snoop traffic between the MTA and Brightmail), their competitors' sales departments would have a field day stealing their customers. The anti-spam business is growing rapidly, but it's very competitive. If any of the companies in this field cut a whitelist deal with a spammer and got caught, the others would eat their lunch;
2) Even if they didn't get caught, lowering their spam prevention effectiveness would cause complaints from their customers and make it harder to beat the competition in comparisons and they'd lose out in the marketplace. Competition is huge, and Brightmail is somewhat limited in that their system only works with some MTAs, whereas some other systems (such as ours) are completely MTA-agnostic, which means we can sell to anyone. They wouldn't dare take such a chance, nor would they trust the spammer to keep his mouth shut if he got in a tight spot. Spammers, after all, are fundamentally unethical people, and an anti-spam company would never trust one.
I don't believe his claim at all.
You would need to use a "CREDIT" card not a "DEBIT" card. I had one company in the past mess with me on a warranty issue. I simply called the bank I had the credit card with and the company finally resolved the issue, but not after having the money ripped out of their hands while they messed around trying to fix things.
When MC/VISA/AMEX start loosing money on spammers, you can bet that they will shut down their merchant accounts.
The thing I fear the most however is dangerous criminal activity from spammers to people who choose to do this. This can only be safe if lots and lots of people do this.
The other danger is bad guys deciding to do this to a legitimate buisness. Say I was an unscrupulous nasty SPAMINAL and I wanted to take out the competition, you could easily generate lots and lots of spam and then link to your competitions web site and watch them go down in a sea of bad transactions. This is what concerns me the most with this scheme.
The original poster seems to have missed the story. OptInRealBig spammer Scott Richter isn't "looking for attention" -- he's being prosecuted for fraud. His (implausible) claims about a deal with Brightmail have been disclosed in emails gathered as evidence by the New York Attorney General's office (that's a 2.5 MB PDF, Richter's Brightmail allegations are on p.90-91).
and post the entire spam with headers to NANAS. Thats a usenet group where people report their spam to, it helps establish a pattern of who is spamming, and keeps companies from later saying they never spammed. Also some of the blacklists check NANAS and will make updates based on who is spamming.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
Another approach is to get a small bank account with a debit card, and never put more money in it than you're willing to risk losing to fraudulent spammers.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
My company is far too small to contract directly with Brightmail so we setup an account with a Brightmail service reseller recommended by Brightmail. The very day we switched our MX record over to them the amount of spam we received actually skyrocketed. I even tested this theory by sending a piece of mail to a brand new mailbox with a GUID as the address through a telnet session directly to the service mailserver. Within an hour that mailbox started to receive spam!
They deny the possibility and called me a liar. We no longer use that service.
There is always the possibility that one of their employees is not so honest and the company has no knowledge of this activity but something is amiss.
"The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion." - Arthur C. Clarke
Most of the major ISPs do this. It cuts down on the amount of filtering they need to do, and avoids false positive problems. However that doesn't mean it lasts. You can call AOL, give them some info and a contact address that they can verify, and they'll let your bulk mail through... but if they start getting complaints they'll block your IPs. So it's possible that when he started he actually did make such agreements, but I seriously doubt they lasted long.