I keep seeing tons of spam whcih abuses the Google "I'm feeling lucky" feature in the hopes of redirecting you to websites for the idiotic fake "herbal remedy" product currently known as "VPXL." It was previously known as Elite Herbal, Manster, Megadik and ManXL. I'm sure they'll change their product name yet again. It all amounts to the same thing. It's fake. It doesn't work. It can cause serious health defects to purchase these pills, which of course they don't want you to know. The current domain being spammed in this way is crazyremedy.com. The barrage of spam for this completely bogus product to two of my accounts using this method is up to 42 per day. These idiots are clearly targeting anyone at all, not caring at all who gets their crap messages or whether they ever care to purchase this bogus "remedy."
Don't support these morons. For each attempt that they make, I will create a posting on this blog to subvert their "I'm feeling lucky" abuse of Google. And of course I'm reporting the "crazyremedy.com" domain.
Spammers, as usual, are complete idiots. I hope every last one of the spammers behind this Genbucks / Tulip Lab promotion get arrested and raided, just like Shane Atkinson did.
Stop clicking on spam for VPXL and other such products, and stop supporting them by purchasing from their totally insecure fly-by-night websites.
SiL / IKS / concerned citizen.
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23 comments:
Its January 5th 2008 and we are still receiving huge amounts of VPXL spam, despite the fact that the New Zealand authorities conducted the Christchurst raid. Any update?
You have to keep in mind: they raided properties related to only one of GenBucks / Sancash's mailers. One. That is not going to *stop* the spam from coming, since GenBucks and Sancash combined have several thousand affiliates.
The hope is, however, that the continuing investigation into this lowlife operation leads to either its shutdown, or further raids on bigger fish like Tulip Lab or the GenBucks offices themselves.
Having said that: Sancash.com is down, and one of their affiliate managers (known as "azzy") has been frantically moving their affiliate operation underground, claiming that there is basically too much exposure.
Tell ya what, azzy, why don't you just stop spamming? You know your affiliates are all spamming the crap out of these "products". Why don't you rein them in?
SiL
Wasn't "Spur-M" also one of their brands? or was that another gang.
They certainly use the same copy writer and address lists.
> Wasn't "Spur-M" also one of their brands? or was that another gang.
You are correct. They spammed Spur-M relentlessly leading up to Christmas in 2006. I and several colleagues discovered a half-configured site and I created a retaliation tool named the Spur-M-Enator(tm). It was highly successful in sending completely fake orders to their back-end servers, resulting in hugely wasted time on their end, and likely lost profits. Within days of creating and releasing that tool, all spam for Spur-M stopped.
The evolution of that crap "product" has been:
Spur-M
Wondercum
Then after our retaliation:
ManXL
Manster
Megadik
Elite Herbal
Herbal King
and now:
Express Herbal
VPXL
Those last seven are likely all precisely the same product.
Another thing I notice: when we're successful at shutting down one of these types of spam runs, they immediately turn to stock spamming. This makes it much easier for law enforcement to track them down, as we've seen from the numerous stock suspensions and arrests in the past year.
SiL
I opened a blog with my colleague due to megadik. We were sending each other our latest spam message and commented upon that. After a while we decided that it would be better if we started sharing that with the rest of the world.
I think in a way we're doing the same, however me and my colleague are doing it with a sense of humor. ;)
To get to the point: we've seen quite a lot of names now and we're up to the point of VPXL. I'm wondering what name they will come up with next...
> I think in a way we're doing the same, however me and my colleague are doing it with a sense of humor. ;)
Hey, nothing wrong with that. I just find it hard to have a sense of humor when thousands of people are getting ripped off on a daily basis by this company and others. :) Up to a point I can have a sense of humor about it, but after a while: enough is enough. These people are criminals, and they need to be stopped.
SiL
I think all people who are affcted by this time-wasting spam should put their hands together to come up with a method to stop it. It is not resonable to waste even one minute every morning trying to delete the unwanted spams that keep on coming!
Any computer wizard out there who can put an end to this?!
> Any computer wizard out there who can put an end to this?!
Well here we get into why spam is much more than a mere annoyance.
You apparently are unaware of the massive expense and effort which several dozen companies are expending to track, analyze, report and ultimately combat spam.
Internationally, efforts to combat and investigate spam is costing us several tens of millions of dollars. Most of these investigations are ongoing and the criminals behind most of these operations are well aware of the heat their spamming generates in the law enforcement community. This is precisely why Sancash completely relocated their affiliate program. They've never publicly stated where the new affiliate portal is located. They know that they're operating illegally.
"Wizards" actually do strike back at these crimninals as well. I and several colleagues are responsible for a lot of domain reporting, and several retaliatory efforts to cause spammers such as these to lose profit. We are having an effect, but that effect is usually short-lived, since the other side quickly mutates whatever sites or mailings they do to get around our efforts. This has been going on for many years. We're not stopping though.
There is no silver bullet in this fight. But I agree: a larger community should exist to fight back against spammers like these. The brighter the light we all shine on these scumbags, the harder it will be for them to find a place to run to.
SiL
If theres a lawsuit against spam on these guys sign me up. My cell phone was a non stop blur for down under male enhancement from December 2007 to early February 2008.
My cell phone company wouldn't disable incoming text messages. I called them for a week.
I let my cell memory fill up for a few weeks, which seemed to cut back on the spam I get now.
I HATE VPXL and companies that spam. Hundreds of messages on my cell phone....
To my knowledge, there hasn't been SMS spam for this in the past, so this is definitely a new wrinkle.
SMS spam is particularly annoying. You should be very happy to know that members of law enforcement in several countries are indeed investigating the whole group of companies behind this operation.
If you or anyone else wants to sue them though, the evidence is out there as to who your legal representatives should contact. (ie: Tulip Labs and Genbucks. More predominantly it's SanCash, but of course they have hidden any method of contacting them.)
SiL
What did you mean by "I'm feeling lucky" abuse?
> What did you mean by "I'm feeling lucky" abuse?
Abuse of Google's "I'm feeling lucky" function.
Spammer sponsor registers a domain.
If they spam that domain to a list of email address who have never heard from his fake "from" email addresses, the filters of pretty much any ISP / email provider will flag it as spam.
So the sponsor or spammer boost the page rank of that domain until it is the top link for a given search.
They then craft a URL which points to google, but which also includes the "I'm feeling lucky" portion of the url, so that it will get past filters (Google is not a malicious domain.)
So if I search for fine italian food, that could look like this:
http://www.google.ca/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=fine+italian+food&btnG=Google+Search&meta=
If I include the "I'm feeling lucky" button click, that url looks like this:
http://www.google.ca/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=fine+italian+food&btnG=Google+Search&meta=&btnI=e76e76t32
Which redirects to the first site in the list.
It includes the segment "&btnI=e76e76t32". That value at the end can be anything, and is usually randomized by the spammer, again to thwart spam filters.
It's a stupid tactic, and Google is well aware of it. This is all to get the unwanted spam message into the inbox (instead of junk folder) of millions of users they know do not want to hear from them. I will never understand why reaching these people is important to them.
Hope that explains it.
SiL / IKS / concerned citizen
IKillSpammerz said...
"Wizards" actually do strike back at these crimninals as well."
Unfortunately there are a lot of collateral damages when striking back :(
There is a big problem with the email protocol itself. Anybody can forge the sender email adress and the return path. Anybody can send spam using youremail@yourdomain.com for sender address...
For me this is the most disturbing problem. Day after deay most of my domains are marked as spam and I don't send one piece of spam email. :(
When I have a succesfully new website spamers always start to use the domain by forgery sooner or later. I receive complains from people asking me to stop spaming their email. I receive a lot of messages with failure delivery containing spams, emails never sended by me or by my webservers...
Spamers send spam using my email addresses into From or Return path. I can't stop this. Nobody can.
To understand how big this phenomenon is... I have domains receiving over 1000 failed delivery messages a day containing spam returning to my inbox... Just reporting an address as spam source will never stop spamers. Spamers are getting smarter and amarter most of them they are not using anymore their own domains or server to send spam. A few days ago I discovered a source of spam (with sender one of my email address) was an insecure contact form from an website. I managed to determine the website authors has nothing to do with the spam. It was an unknown visitor to their website using some security bugs into their contact form to send spam with my wmail address as sended... How can you fight this? Huh?
> I managed to determine the website
> authors has nothing to do with the spam.
> It was an unknown visitor to their
> website using some security bugs into
> their contact form to send spam with my
> wmail address as sended... How can you
> fight this? Huh?
By reporting it to the website owner, obviously. Spammers consistently attempt to take advantage of malformed or insecure code on a daily basis. They abuse everything they can, constantly. They do so because they assume that nobody will complain, that someone like you as mad as you are about it will merely hit "delete" and move on.
It's up to each of us to choose to prove them wrong.
Spammers always assume that their target audience is stupid. When "Operation Bot Roast" announced that they had arrested and, later, convicted several individuals for causing thousands of computers to become infected with trojans and backdoors, several spammers felt that arrest and conviction was completely unfair. I'll quote from a posting dated Jan. 7th, 2008 on now-defunct bulkerforum:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
wex
Posted: Mon Jan 07, 2008 7:58 pm
That's sad, people going to prison over Microsoft bullshit. the only reason these kids are coming up with new ways to deliver is cuz they're getting blocked .. These law enforcement agencies are fucking retarded if they think its more then software and tcp/ip . what significant difference did this make to the supposed "victims" who dont even know they're "infected" oh wait microsoft can't afford it huh. I was under the impression god doesn't turn his back on anybody.. These people are in PRISON over electronic mail which is worse... condeming somebody to prison for MICROSOFT BULLSHIT or operating a 'botnet'. I'm sure home owners saved thousands on their mortgage thanks to adam and got their penis enlarged. u fuck faces. they can't press delete ya. like this kid isn't trying to eat $540 omfg....
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So: as far as "wex" here is concerned, it's your fault that someone else tried to infect you, because you run a Microsoft OS, and Microsoft should have money enough to fix their OS, and that solves everything. You didn't hit delete, so it's "your fault" that you got infected, not the person who was trying to infect you. This should show you how completely misguided the average spammer is. They have so few scruples that they actively argue that an illegal act is not illegal, despite there being, you know, laws that say otherwise.
If your car was in a collision with a driver who had no license and was driving erratically, violating several laws and endangering the public at large, and that driver's response to your accusation that he shouldn't be allowed to drive was "your car company can afford to make a safer car, you're just stupid for owning it", we can all imagine the public outcry which might ensue. Yet this is precisely the point of view of many illegal spammers. They violate the laws, yet it's apparently "our fault."
Complain to the site owner whose email form is so easy to abuse. It's pretty straightforward. And no, there unfortunately isn't much you can do regarding the abuse of your domain as a "from" address. Spammers will likely claim that's also your fault.
SiL
This spam is generated by the /Windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts file. I had the same problem with this spammed email. Avg flaged a changed Hosts file. By deleting the file and replacing it with the microsoft default Hosts file and setting it's attribute to read only it seems (24 hrs.) that I have cured the problem. The corruption of the Hosts file is a virus/worm/trojan that appears to :-
1) Send an email to yourself and possibly bulk mails others from your computer
2) Modify the name of the web site that the hyperlink in the email (it is still expressherbal)
If anyone is interested in how to remove this from the hoste file please go to:-http://caradoc-killspammers.blogspot.com/
> This spam is generated by the /Windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts file.
I'm not sure how that's possible, since the hosts file is a flat text file. It must be that some other application / infection is modifying the hosts file while also using it for other nefarious means.
If you have further details - especially any kind of tcp log of what your pc does when the hosts file is modified by whatever process is doing it - I'd be all ears. Or better yet: I could just follow your blog.
Thanks for the research.
SiL
I think that the solution is near-by if only the rate of exposure to certain illitare operators of system who call them selfs spammers can be curb by disallowing connections by strict monitoring and investigation.
sunday
These people are suffocating me with XPXL messages and I'm a woman.
I have pleaded with them, nicely, to stop and then got nasty with them, but nothing worked. I had hundreds, which I kept for a long time, but deleted them all this weekend.
I made the mistake, one time, over a year ago, to order from CANADIAN PHARMACY, that's when it all started. They are just as bad, I have tried to UNSUBSCRIBE and they also suffocate me with e-mails.
Would changing e-mail address help?
> These people are suffocating me with XPXL messages and I'm a
> woman.
Well of course they are. They literally don't care who you are. You have an email address. That's all they're concerned with.
> I have pleaded with them, nicely, to stop and then got nasty
> with them, but nothing worked. I had hundreds, which I kept
> for a long time, but deleted them all this weekend.
How, precisely, did you "communicate" with them?
I have firm evidence that their "contact us" forms serve no purpose. They send no message to anyone, ever. They're merely there for show.
> I made the mistake, one time, over a year ago, to order from
> CANADIAN PHARMACY, that's when it all started.
So I have to ask: what did you expect??
Honestly. Every word of those websites is an outright lie. Why on earth would anyone give up their contact information to a site like that?! (Never mind your credit card info, which by the way has probably also been used for fraudulent domain registration without your knowledge.)
Once you purchase from them, and they discover it's from an address they were initially mailing to, you are in their list for life.
> They are just
> as bad, I have tried to UNSUBSCRIBE and they also suffocate
> me with e-mails.
> Would changing e-mail address help?
At this point I'd have to say: yes. Consider that address to be unusable. This should most definitely serve as a lesson to anyone: NEVER purchase from a website which is promoted via mass amounts of unwanted spam.
SiL / IKS / concerned citizen
SPAM--AN ETHICAL PROBLEM THAT CONCERNS US ALL
Spam, as most know, is unsolicited commercial e-mail, or UCE, that negatively impacts upon the speed and capacity of the internet available for use by legitimate users. Additionally, spammers entice the less knowledgeable to provide their personal and financial details on line, via insecure order forms requesting credit card details, for purchasing counterfeit goods, often never delivered to the customer, and if delivered, often non-functional. Even e-Bay allows counterfeiters to operate on line, due to lack of vigilance, although e-Bay if pushed will refund money paid on illegitimate items.
Major credit card companies and supporting banks facilitate this trade, by providing funds to such offshore, illicit organisations as “I-Bank’ operating out of the Caribbean islands. This criminal facility facilitates spammers in stealing innocent people’s credit card funds. I-bank also serves as go-between for spammers who provide bogus pen pal lists and pornography. Although so-called legitimate banks and credit card companies will offer to reverse charges to mobs like I-bank on demand of customers, banks and credit card providers refuse steadfastly to report such matter to federal law enforcers and federal treasury departments for prosecution. Instead, “legitimate” credit providers continue to profit off the merchant fees charged to mobs like I-bank, irrespective of the unethical and often criminal acuities facilitated by such mobs.
Additionally, domain name registrars (DNRs) make millions of dollars a year providing domain names to spammers, which are essential to putting up a webpage. Moniker.com, Tucows.com [and their Indian resellers], enom.com, register.com have all provided domain names to well-known spammers. Spammers order domain names in bundles of hundreds, using innocent peoples’ credit card details in payment, often providing as contacts the names, addresses and phone numbers of innocent persons. Absolutely no efforts are made by DNRs to investigate the payment legitimacy or contact details for domain names, prior to registration. This is akin to an on-line ordering or airline booking service that would not verify contact details and credit card validity, prior to releasing goods and services--and this as we all know does not happen. One wonders, then, whether DNRs hire such greedy or otherwise inept personnel as to allow spammers free rein in domain name registration, when it should be too easy to install a “veri-sign” method of checking up on all proposed domain name registrants, prior to accepting credit card details or registering a domain name to a fraud.
Spammers generally use “spambot” computers to transmit their unlawful messages. One finds these computers in Korea, Taiwan, Russia, eastern Europe, and China. Beijing Innovative Technology Linkage and Xin Net Technology have been extensively used during the past year. Reports have been made to the Chinese Embassy on numerous occasions, and no one at the Embassy understands enough English to comprehend the import and severity of their country’s refusal to neutralise Beijing Innovative and Xin Net.
Spammers sometimes use paid co-conspirators to send spam from internet cafes. This practice could easily be stopped by requiring all internet café personnel to “do the rounds” and check that patrons are not allowed to insert CDs into public access computers prior to insertion of these CDs by authorised personnel. If violators are detected either prior to or during transmission of spam, internet café owners and personnel must report these violators to local and federal authorities immediately and ensure that the perpetrators are taken into custody.
Spammers additionally send Trojan worms to millions of e-mail users. These pernicious viruses can infect a computer simply if the user opens the e-mail, without even clicking on any links. A Trojan then sends out more spam spoofing the captured computer’s IP address. Few if any of the commercially available e-mail screeners or virus scanners seem able to stop Trojan invasions.
Spammers recently have begun providing telephone numbers in messages, such as the all-too-common ones about making over $3500 a day from home, and the UK lotto ones as well. Telephone companies provide services to these criminals, in violation of national and international telecommunications laws. These companies need to be ferreted out and shut down as punishment for providing spammers with telephone service to defraud the public.
Spam is a criminal activity that injures innocent Internet users. It is simply not adequate for an ISP to tell customers to just trash spam. That’s akin to telling a nuclear power station to simply toss their spent fuel rods into a rubbish bin for hauling to the local tip. This, of course, does happen, despite laws and claims to the contrary by the nuclear industry. However, such practice is not at all acceptable nor ethical. Likewise, relying upon e-mal users to simply trash UCE spam is neither appropriate nor ethical, as it still allows spammers to operate in violation of our laws.
Eliminating spammers from the internet will require firstly that ISPs, Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft all cooperate to develop a firewall so effective that any message with false headers, Russian/eastern European/Chinese origins, or contacting certain key words no matter how misspelled, are immediately recognised and bounced back to origin, without permitting said messages to travel anywhere within legitimate airspace. Those persons or companies dealing with legitimate contacts in these countries can certainly designate their non-criminal contacts as “friends” on their e-mail screeners. With all the financial resources these big IT companies possess, they can well afford to sack deadwood currently working with their firms, and to hire eager, super-intelligent IT nerds who salivate at the prospect of blocking spam completely from the Internet.
Additionally, law enforcement agencies must hire a similar crowd of IT wizards who salivate at the prospect of catching big spammers like Leo Kuvayev and Alex Polyakov [currently suspected of hiding in America], prosecuting these criminals, and sending them prison for long terms, as well as RICOing their ill-gotten gains.
Banks and credit card providers must take spam as seriously as bank robbery and treat identity theft as criminal fraud that absolutely needs to be thoroughly in investigated with resultant prosecutions of the guilty parties. Financial institutions must cease providing lines of credit and other credit or financial facilities to spammers and their cohorts, such as I-bank. It is simply not adequate to reverse a spurious charge for a customer, without referring the matter to federal law enforcement for investigation and prosecution of those culpable.
Domain name registrars must be made legally responsible for every domain registered, in that full and complete pre-registration investigations of proposed domain names must be performed, prior to registering these names on line. Credit card details used in payment for these domains must be pre-approved by the issuing institution, meaning that the same “verisign” type checks be performed on credit cards used by spammers to register domain names, as the methods sued to verify ordinary peoples’ credit cards when used for legitimate purposes. Odd spelled and weird sounding domain names in particular, such as “weaselsneak.com” or “penileerect.com” must be immediately rejected as suspect.
In order for the internet to function legitimately and efficiently, all users, service providers, and especially the big names like Microsoft and Google who make so much from Internet users, must begin to act ethically by promising to eliminate spam completely by 1 January 2010, and to fulfil this promise to all Internet users, upon pain of cancellation of Google’s and Microsoft’s and other big names on the Net’s licences to operate on the Internet at all.
Refusal to improve ethics in internet usage reflects the moral disintegration that neo-liberal capitalism allows under the rubric of corporatism. Without imposing ethics on Internet users, the Net has detracted into a playground for criminal spammers. Indeed, at least 90% of all e-mails today are UCE spam.
Not only should this not be so. We must all demand that Microsoft, Google and their cohorts contribute a mere 1% of their enormous annual profits to ridding the Net of criminal spammers. If our law makers, law enforcers, and financial institutions are not up to the task, this condemns us to receiving unwanted spam and to an internet clogged with criminal users who prevent the rest of us from enjoying its full potential.
R WOLFF
Wow. That's not just a comment: it's an essay. :) But I published it anyway.
> Spam is a criminal activity that injures innocent Internet
> users. It is simply not adequate for an ISP to tell
> customers to just trash spam. That's akin to telling a
> nuclear power station to simply toss their spent fuel rods
> into a rubbish bin for hauling to the local tip. This, of
> course, does happen, despite laws and claims to the contrary
> by the nuclear industry. However, such practice is not at
> all acceptable nor ethical. Likewise, relying upon e-mal
> users to simply trash UCE spam is neither appropriate nor
> ethical, as it still allows spammers to operate in violation
> of our laws.
This paragraph essentially sums up why I got involved in fighting this criminal activity in the first place. Relying on filters is basically burying your head in the sand. "Just deleting them" ignores the fact that you're essentially saying it's okay for them to keep sending these messages, profiting from illegal activity, and most importantly harming the general public.
> Additionally, law enforcement agencies must hire a similar
> crowd of IT wizards who salivate at the prospect of catching
> big spammers like Leo Kuvayev and Alex Polyakov [currently
> suspected of hiding in America], prosecuting these
> criminals, and sending them prison for long terms, as well
> as RICOing their ill-gotten gains.
I personally feel that both of those names are total red herrings. Sure, they might be real people, but they are not the focus. The focus should be on the readily-identifiable sponsors and supporters of illegal spam. Those are not Leo Kuvayev or Alex Polyakov. Nor are they "Yambo Financials." I have the impression that anytime an actual spammer sees those names in print or otherwise used in any discussion regarding spam, they laugh at those who use them.
The real focus should be on people like bulkerforum user Caesar, or crypto. They created a lot of the software that many illegal spammers rely on, and they continue to profit by selling them. The focus should also be on sponsor organizations such as bulker.biz (now known as bulkerbiz.com thanks to their domain being one of thousands which was shut down in the Intercage / Atrivo / Directi actions back in September) who are responsible for the "My Canadian Pharmacy", "Canadian Health&Care Mall" and "Men+Drugs" sites (to name only three.) They are also responsible for the wholesale hijacking of thousands of publicly owned unix or linux servers without their owners' consent or knowledge. They do this to gain essentially cost-free web hosting and DNS services. Another major sponsor is Glavmed, also known as Spamit. They aren't hard to find, (glavmed.com) and they're directly responsible for the huge amounts of spam everybody continues to receive promoting "Canadian Pharmacy."
Why nobody from law enforcement or the FTC has gone after these groups is frankly baffling. They are profiting on a daily basis while continuing to abuse every online service known to man, and selling verifiably fake and dangerous products to consumers.
> Domain name registrars must be made legally responsible for
> every domain registered, in that full and complete
> pre-registration investigations of proposed domain names
> must be performed, prior to registering these names on
> line.
Sadly, neither I nor most other IT professionals could ever see this taking place. One of the major things that makes domain registration profitable is the ease with which the process can be automated.
Fortunately, especially in recent months, we are beginning to see a lot of activity not on behalf of law enforcement, but on behalf of the media and the IT industry at large, shining a very bright light on the illegal operators of several botnets, and the companies who support them either by providing hosting, domain registration services, or network connectivity. I don't expect this to die down anytime soon either. It's the first time ever that anyone has been able to have such a noticable effect on hampering the profits of illegal spammers. It's definitely a good sign.
Don't give up hope. Numerous actions have taken place this year to damage the profits of illegal spammers. More are underway. We haven't seen the end of this fight, and we're all just getting warmed up.
Thanks for your comment.
SiL / IKS / concerned citizen
I receive hundreds of emails from canadian pharmacy, "from my email address to my email address" EVERY DAY. They have damaged my business because I have had to open many of these emails with the subject line similar to bounced emails to ensure that it is not a client Ive written to which the email has not been delivered to. It is costing me at least an hour a day and Ive accidently deleted legitimate emails and lost business as a result. It is time to take action once and for all. Writing to registrars, hosts etc etc doesnt work. What about the credit card companies that process these criminals orders? If it can be shown they are processing criminals orders, can they not be sued as accessories if they continue? ie. mastercard visa etc etc?That would certainly solve the problem. If anyone has any ideas, please get in touch. This has got to th point where it has become very personal. I have no problm with a spam email once in a while but when I get hundreds every day, it is hard not to take it personally. president (at) businessventure.com - canadian pharmacy spam in the subject line. Any ideas or input? Thanks. Mark
> It is time to take action once and for all. Writing to
> registrars, hosts etc etc doesnt work. What about the credit
> card companies that process these criminals orders? If it
> can be shown they are processing criminals orders, can they
> not be sued as accessories if they continue? ie. mastercard
> visa etc etc?That would certainly solve the problem.
You would think that would be an obvious approach. The problem is that these sites use what are known as "high risk merchant accounts", typically hosted offshore from the United states. We can have no idea where, precisely, or what the company's name is. You could certainly attempt to contact Visa and express disdain for their continued support for the merchant accounts behind these sites, and even engage in an investigative process with them, placing bait orders with your card so that they can better identify the merchant account which processes the order. I'm surprised that nobody has attempted this in the four years that the spammers behind Canadian Pharmacy has been in operation.
> If anyone has any ideas, please get in touch. This has got
> to th point where it has become very personal. I have no
> problm with a spam email once in a while but when I get
> hundreds every day, it is hard not to take it personally.
> president (at) businessventure.com - canadian pharmacy spam
> in the subject line. Any ideas or input? Thanks. Mark
First off, I would recommend that you not take it
personally. These idiot spammers have no idea who you are. They're just hoping that one day you'll purchase something from one of their idiot sites. They could care less who you are, or how you feel about it. To them it's just business. They're scum.
What I would recommend, especially if you have the money or legal representation to do so, is to go after the affiliate program which is responsible for Canadian Pharmacy: Glavmed. (glavmed.com) They make no attempt to hide their processes or the fact tha they're lying on every page of their ridiculous sites. You're in a unique position to take a very public legal stance against them: they're causing your actual business to suffer damages, and they're damaging your brand. They are costing you time and energy, and ultimately affecting your ability to do business. There are numerous charges you could make against them which have nothing to do with whether they sent the spam messages illegally or not. Wire fraud. Mail fraud. Interference. Conspiracy. Plus of course the fact that their products are not only fake but harmful, and cause great risk to the general public.
And following that, since you're capable of suing them on behalf of your company, you can include CAN-SPAM charges galore. They are very well aware that their sites are promoted primarily via illegally-sent, unwanted, non-compliant spam to the tune of several million messages per day. They also abuse several brands by using their whitelisted email templates as the template for spam promoting their sites.
The list goes on and on. I'm not even a lawyer. I bet your legal representatives could easily come up with numerous other charges against this obviously criminal organization.
Why hasn't anyone gone after Glavmed after all this time? Everybody I know has seen spam for Canadian Pharmacy. Everyone knows they're operating illegally and have potential links to Russian organized crime. Everyone I've informed about Glavmed's existence is happier to know that at least there's a place to find the scumbags behind this operation, but nobody - not one person - goes after them.
The time is now. Somebody - or even a group of people or companies - should really gather their resources and sue the asses off this company. Involve the FDA and the FTC. Involve Pfizer (who must be painfully aware of how badly this is impacting their brand and their company's image.)
Why not you?
SiL / IKS / concerned citizen
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