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Ask Slashdot: What To Do With Spammers You Know?
courteaudotbiz writes "For years, a business named Compu-Finder has been sending spam all around the province of Quebec, Canada. In their emails, there is a phone number where we can reach them, and an unsubscribe link that you can click and seems to work, but even after asking them on the phone, by email or with their unsubscribe link, to unsubscribe me, I still receive 10 — 15 spams a week coming from this company. Many bloggers, journalists and radio chroniclers talked about them, but they seem to be untouchable. Still, it is easy to find the names, addresses and phone numbers of the shareholders and administrators of the company. How can we, collectively, take action to make them understand that we do not like their mass mailing practice?"
Document it thoroughly and submit a report to the authorities. If that doesn't work, go to their offices and switch off the main power panel a few times until they get the hint.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
How can we, collectively, take action to make them understand that we do not like their mass mailing practice?
Are you under the impression that spam continues because people think we like it? That if they only understood how much we don't like it, they would stop?
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Usually having a phone number is great!... for the spammers. It now gives them another reference for you and more info to sell and abuse. as for unsubscribing, well, that just shows them that a live human actually is at that address and reading email from spammers.. Goldstrike if you called and unsubscribed.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
with pitchforks and torches
Really, it's the only way to get through to some people.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Publicise the names and personal details of their CEO and board of directors.
Subscribe their email addresses to every spam product and service you can find.
I can speak on this company from a first hand account. I work for an ESP, I actually manage all our mail servers and work closely with ISPs and mail vendors to help out GOOD CLIENTS. I say this because Compu-Finder (although they have an official name that is different) was a client of ours. They were a BAD-CLIENT. We have many tools that are in place to help our clients ensure that best practices are followed as well as easily available to contacts of the client, e.g opt-outs and suppressing those contacts from future emails. Compu-Finder did everything they could to get around built in mechanisms to keep "contacts" subscribed. Well Finally after battling with them on changing their practices we finally fired them. They are the kind of company that makes me cringe because I know there are real, legitimate, marketers out there that do use email to engage clients and keep them up-to-date but they are the ones that make it bad for any sender.
Just block their domain and get on with your life. If you value your time at, say, $20/hr, how much are you willing to spend in order to get nothing in return?
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
There is a simple and SUPER fun way to combat this. Get the google toolbar with auto fill for forms, and sign up for every free thing on the market you can with their address. This was done to a spammer a couple years back in the US and I guess once your postal mail volume reaches a certain ammount they stop delivering it, and bill you if you dont pick it up. If 10000 people sign them up for 1000 deliveries of junk real mail, they might get the picture. Maybe....
Ah, but it's Quebec.
Make sure they follow the language laws, if not, report them to the language police. They're apparently quite vicious.
Also, Quebec has very special status in Canada since they basically want to do everything themselves and only give token attention to Ottawa (they have their own sales tax - QST, that the Harper Government (tm) is paying $4B or so for them to change it to an "H" to implement the HST which would do the same thing). Quebec can easily make it very hard for a business that's not obeying its laws to do business inside Quebec, even if they're not in Quebec.
It's why in Canada there's lots of things that are "excluding Quebec" - not just sweepstakes/lottos/etc, but also products that basically are unavailable to be shipped to Quebec. They have the requisite French, but they don't meet some other part of Quebec law and are therefore disallowed.
The CAN-SPAM act loses what little punch it has as soon as you cross the state line from New York into Quebec . . .
www.wavefront-av.com
I got a call from a telemarketer on my cell phone at 3AM one day. I called the number back and found that it was a standard voice/prompt setup. I randomly dialed buttons until I got to a dial by extension choice. I then dialed every extension I could think of, leaving voicemails on every line, stating that the next time I get called on my cell phone at 3AM I would sue the company out of existence. Where I live the law is on my side on this, it is illegal to call before 9AM or after 7PM here. It must have gotten through to one of the people I left a voicemail for, because they never called again. Harass them more than they harassed you by wasting their time, and they'll find a way to stay out of contact with you.
And never, ever, ever click unsubscribe from anyone but the most reputable companies. It lets the spammers know that someone at that address actually reads those emails, and they don't mind sharing it with their sister companies.
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know. --Aldous Huxley
Within a week after I had been contacted by one drug spammer that I sued, my spam load went down by 50%.
Another Spammer I sued, put in place a strong anti-spam policy and apparently quite effective.
When I went after Avtech Direct (Arlene Sediqzad and Gary Hunziker ) for spamming, I also helped arrange 21 lawsuits against them. After this was over, Sediqzad told me she wish she never heard of e-mail, and had not heard of it until Gary Hunziker got her into using it. Another spammer, Robert Smoley, stopped, only because he was charged, pled guilty, and sentenced to 40 months. They also seized over $40M of money and property from him. I think that is one of my most productive 45 minute phone calls with an IRS agent ever.
But this company you talk to is like Smoley, or Ralsky who needs to be sued multiple times or imprisoned for a while before they stop spamming.
Fight Spammers!
Or, even better, if you can get their fax number how about full-color Goatse in the mail or by fax? By email too, but Goatse coming out of a fax machine seems like it would be a nice gift to send them.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
At first glance we see this is the personally efficient way to handle the situation. Block their mail and move on. But then we might wonder if we're being a little selfish, not engaging our computer skills to help out others, the many others who are negatively affected by this spam. A little altruism is generally recognized as a noble thing...
This could lead us to thinking about the systems that have been developed for reporting spam, how individuals have been empowered to spend little effort in reporting, and how, when summed, that individually trivial effort, of thousands and thousands of people, collectively makes powerful anti-spam effect.
Then maybe we complete the circle, realizing that we are the beneficiaries of these powerful anti-spam systems, that our time is greatly saved by these systems, and that we are not just being altruistic in our contributions, we are helping ourselves.
The personally efficient way to handle many things is this way, being helpful to the larger community that you are by nature a member of, and personally capitalizing on the beneficial effects of the economies of scale and other mass dynamics/synergistic effects.
This is where selfishness meets altruism. So, why not help others, when you are really helping yourself?
Been done.
Didn't work.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
One should go one step further. The problem with your proposal is that a free speech argument would be made. You are not offering a service to the individual, and there is no way that receiving any kind of mail is going to be counted as a service by any court. You need to supply a service to the spammer.
Ad to your letter that one of the services that your business provides is "marketing consulting", and that the address they are sending the spam to is the evaluation request address. Thus, by submitting their work to that address they are requesting your "marketing consulting" services. Then when you send them your bill, make sure that you give them a fair assessment of their marketing strategy. E.G. "After careful consideration, we have determined that your marketing method is a poor choice." You have then had services requested, and you have services supplied. Personally, my marketing consulting is really good, and due to the nature of the work is not an billed at an hourly rate. My rates are $1500 as a promotional price for the first analysis, further analysis are $10,000 for standard email evaluation, and $20,000 for drug, dating, or sex industries email evaluation.
The promotional price would work out well because it falls within the values covered by small claims court, so you don't need a lawyer. If you get a judgement in the first case, it seems unlikely that a court would not recognize that the spammer was in a preexisting business relationship with you, give that he has previously been order by the court to pay his bill for those exact same services. This should make it much easier to find a lawyer who would be willing to take the subsequent, higher value cases on contingency.
I don't know Quebec law well enough to know if this would apply to them.
Now, they just come at you from a new IP address within hours.
Greylisting is your friend. Your mail server gives them a service temporarily unavailable error. If their mail server follows the SMTP standard, it comes back a few hours later from the same IP address and gets let through. Most spammers are interested in volume, and don't waste resources following up like that. And if they do, and it happens to be a new IP address, then they get delayed again for having a new IP address.
It doesn't take long for Greylisting filters to learn legitimate hosts, especially if you receive a fair amount of mail from said hosts, and within a day or two you won't notice any delays at all with legitimate mail.
Toss the spammers on their asses,
Fa la la la la, la la la la
Quebec has a special legal status in Canada because Canada is still, last I checked, a federation.
That being said, Francophones are welcoming, friendly people. Some people live here without ever uttering a French word and Quebecois go out of their way to accommodate them. Those who want to learn French are actually annoyed by it.
Montreal is a truly multicultural city, and every small culture is free to express itself, in all manners, restaurants, soccer team fans, and they are and do feel appreciated.
Look at the crime rates, those don't lie: Montreal is one of the safest and coolest city in North-America. But don't tell, we don't want to get over-crowded.
Don't believe Haper's propaganda. He is out to spend public money on prisons, so his new friends will finance his re-election.
And come visit us, before talking nonsense.
I once had a similar problem; endless spam coming from a trying-to-be-legitimate business despite numerous requests for them to stop it.
Ultimately I emailed every administrative contact I could find for the company with something along the lines of:
"Thank you for trying the Robot Monster Unsolicited Email Processing Service.
While your first email is processed for free, any additional emails are processed at a fee of $1000.
A 10% discount is available if payment is received prior to the email.
Any additional emails sent to this email address will be interpretted as an acceptance of these charges."
I was kinda disappointed I never heard from them again -- was looking forward to sending them invoices.
Send them an email, carboned to every email address for everybody in the company you can find. That email says something along the lines of:
I am getting a large amount of spam emails from your company. I have tried normal channels to get them to stop, but they have actually gotten worse. I am appealing to you to put a halt to these emails. I will forward you examples of the emails I have received.
Then set up an auto-forward rule that forwards every single spam to that same list, with the text:
Here is an example of the spam I am receiving from your company. As I acquire more examples, I will forward them on as well.
I bet they'll stop in a few days.
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Yeah, and Al Capone was not a gangster, he just cheated on his taxes.
Fight Spammers!