Slashdot Mirror
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"
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.
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!
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.