Spamming And Marketing Are Two Different Things

Spammers continue to assume that spamming anyone, regardless of their interest in their products and services, is a great business plan.

Dollar (aka Swank, aka Christopher J. Brown) posted the following quite a while ago (Oct. 2006):

...this industry is full of immature haters, losers and competitors that hate to see you doing things. Having haters is a sign that youve made it in this industry.

He's wrong of course. One can be a completely compliant mailer and obey laws and not use hijacked machines to perform their business functions and they will significantly reduce the number of people who hate them.

If you spam me, and I object to it, and in response you spam me three times as much as last time: what do you THINK my reaction is going to be? If you keep doing it for weeks, months and years on end: how much better do you think my opinion of you will get? How much will I respect you?

I have a couple of email addresses which have been on somebody's spam lists since the late 1990's. I never asked to be put on them and they were likely scraped from ancient postings on usenet and old websites. There's nothing I can do about that. And now these same spammers are re-selling the lists which include my address, and they simply don't care that in the 10+ years I've been on them: I've never purchased anything from them, and I have never clicked on any of their ridiculous tracking links. They will never see dollar one from me, ever, as long as I live. Yet the messages continue to flood my and millions of other people's inboxes. They seem to think this is a winning business strategy. If dollar is one of these idiots: I'm shocked that he's "made it" in any industry much less bulk unsolicited email marketing.

I have nothing against an individual who chooses email as a marketing tool. However if that same individual starts choosing my email address apropos of nothing to start promoting products I would never in my lifetime wish to hear about: how is that good business sense? Hardcore career spammers see this kind of complaint as mere whining and fail to address it, and then wonder why they get arrested for doing precisely that. I will never understand this mentality.

Marketing thrives on recognizing and addressing a target group of consumers. It's been this way since the first flyer was deposited in a mailbox. You fit a certain age, gender and educational demographic, you will eventually see marketing targeted specifically for you. You may not want it, and for most traditional (a.k.a.: legal or legitimate) marketing formats, you can complain about it, and in most companies the company that sent you their materials has to stop doing so. Spamming - and by spamming I mean indiscriminate, uncleaned list, wholesale email blasting - is quite different. Everyone receives it, studies show that far less than 0.1% of that audience wants it, and everyone is spending lots of money to stop it from getting through. Spammers in return double their efforts to get around these countermeasures.

Why?

Who are the idiots who are finally throwing their hands up in the air and suddenly buying fake Viagra, at risk of their health and their personal data, upon receiving yet another unsolicited, misspelled spam message, probably with heavy obfuscation and an image attachment? Who are these people? Why are they sending their hard-earned money to these miscreants? It just simply does not make any sense. If I weren't seeing any of this spam, I would scarcely believe that anyone would click through it, much less continue on to placing an order, but apparently somebody out there is freakishly stupid enough to do so.

Spammers make the same highly misinformed claims over and over again:

1. They are rich, and we envy them for it (discussed previously on this very blog.)


2. Complaints - especially lots of them - are a sign of success in the spam industry.


3. Spamming is perfectly legal and "just another form of marketing".


4. If you don't like it, you can "just delete it". How hard is that to understand?


5. If they weren't spamming you, somebody else would anyway.


6. Marketing is everywhere, you should just get used to this form of "marketing" as well.

I don't need to go into laborious detail as to why these are all completely false claims.

Everybody by now knows that when you receive 20,000 spam messages and in the midst of them are the three or four genuine messages you actually wanted to read, you can't "just delete" all of them. You have to weed your way through them in the hopes that you don't accidentally delete a genuinely wanted message. This is time consuming and frustrating for pretty much everybody out there who receives email.

Marketing, and by marketing I mean genuine, legitimate, professional marketing, has rules and guidelines surrounding it which career spammers do not follow. For example: I, as an individual or a citizen, cannot just brazenly put up a huge billboard on someone else's building or vehicle. I can't erect that same billboard on land I do not own. I can't call your phone number if you have explicitly entered it onto a "do not call" list. If I violate any of these rules, you could sue me. People do get sued for these infractions and they can face severe punishment including heavy fines and revocation of business licenses for doing so. I can't enter your house and put up posters promoting my product either. There are numerous civil laws which prevent me from performing such activities on property which is not mine.

There's also the small matter of the cost of these forms of marketing. You have to invest a huge amount of time, money and effort to pull of a successful billboard, radio or TV ad campaign. Coca Cola spend billions of dollars every year on TV ads alone and it's a very successful method of marketing for them. Part of the reason Coca Cola is not lumped in with the likes of these career spammers is because they want a very specific message to reach a fairly specific (though widespread) demographic: thirsty young people. If they started sending emails in the same way that these spammers are doing you can absolutely guarantee that they would be vilified and investigated for doing so. There are rules. Coca Cola is following them. Spammers are not.

Spammers ignore all of that and make the blanket statement that spamming is "just another form of marketing." We see billboards every day. Do we complain about them as much as we do about spamming? Of course not. Do we complain about all the TV ads we see every day? Some of us do. But again there's a difference.

If spammers ran the TV ad industry, not only would there be more ads, there would be several hundred of them in sequence, leaving you a measly 2 minutes of actual TV program to watch for every hour of TV you spent watching. People do hate TV ads, but again: there are very specific rules around how often, at what time, and over what period of time you will end up seeing an ad. If I was watching a new episode of Lost and the first commercial break showed me 79 TV ads for a bogus drugstore: I would turn off my TV. I would also complain to the producers of lost that they had "Lost" me as a viewer for good unless they stopped this rampant marketing of products which don't appeal to me. People have done this, and networks have paid attention to this type of complaint.

My comparison of spamming to urination still holds as far as I'm concerned. People urinate every day, several times a day. That doesn't mean that it's okay to urinate anywhere you want, or on people, or on public transit, or at the dinner table. There are specific places to do this, and if you want people to respect you and not be offended, you'll do it where you're supposed to. Nor should you be surprised when people get angry with you for doing so, especially if you keep doing it when asked to stop.

There are rules.

Why this is not obvious to spammers is thoroughly perplexing.

SiL

The Attack Continues...

Well the other shoe just dropped, I guess is the saying.

My old stomping grounds, thecarpcstore.com/phpbb2, was knocked offline this morning by (you guessed it) a DDOS attack.

Given the staggering amount of evidence present here and elsewhere on the web, who do you think it could be that would want to perform that kind of attack? Who would have access to the resources needed to do so? Why members of that old stalwart: bulkerforum.biz of course.

I expect it will be a very small number of days before the boasting begins on that selfsame web forum, and elsewhere.

But what does this accomplish, ultimately? All of the individuals who contributed to that forum: they still hate getting all the spam that these idiots keep sending. They hate that despite asking numerous times to stop sending all of it to them, these spammers haven't stopped. And they hate that not only do they continue to get these unwanted messages, very often they get them twice as much.

How is this good for anyone's business? How hard is it for these moron spammers to recognize that they should just clean their lists? Clearly they don't seem to understand that they're consistently targeting - and thereby abusing - the wrong audience for their so-called "products", and they're wasting a huge amount of people's time, energy and money. They're also ruining the whole experience of the internet in the process.

Spammers love to blame people like me because we "can't find the delete key." That completely misses the point: I didn't want it in the first place, and you just confirmed that you KNEW I didn't want it. That makes you, the spammer, doubly stupid.

Attacking sites which take on the task of compiling data regarding their operations, and reporting and exposing their underlying personnel, only further exposes how tenuous your "business" is in the first place. If all it takes to piss you off is bring more attention to how you operate, doesn't that make it that much more probable that we'll make sure that the same info gets into the hands of someone with more tangible tools to take you down? DDOS'ing our little forum is proof that we've been on the right track for a while, and it's further proof that the spammers somehow think that this information is "dangerous" to have in the public eye. Knocking that forum down won't stop the information from being made available. Nor will it stop those of us who have collaborated so closely over the past year and more to make sure we tell even more people about these scumbags.

Many members on bulkerforum.biz like to make the claim that (a) we're just jealous because they can profit from spamming and (b) that they are only making an "honest" living, and that we hate them for that. ("The terrorists hate our freedom")

They fail to provide any answer at all when it's pointed out that the "drugs" that they are promoting via their spam comes from sites that lie; they're not secure, they have absolutely no support or endorsement from the Better Business Bureau, or Visa, or VeriSign, and the drugs that they sell are fake.

They don't have any answer when we point out that stock spam is indeed an illegal and fraudulent act, which carries with it some very high fines and sentences. How is that an "honest" business.

Fake diplomas: how "honest" is that as a product? That's not legal either. How is it an honest way to make a living? Would you trust a guy to build your house if he had a fake engineering degree? How about your lawyer? How about your doctor? We're supposed to be envious that this is how they make a living? That's total bullshit.

Selling mortgage leads collected via spam may be profitable, but that doesn't make it any more legitimate when you're spamming it to people who aren't even in the US to begin with (easily more than half these idiots' lists are full of peoplle from Canada and overseas, none of whom are supposed to be offered these mortgages in the first place. The spammers know this, yet they don't clean them from their lists, and further to that: they ban the ip addresses for overseas users.

How is any of that "honest" or legitimate? And why on earth would any of us be envious of any spammer who said that they profited from it? People have already started dying from taking some of the fake drugs sold by these illegal pharmacies. What else will it take?

DDOS'ing our forum won't stop that information from getting out, and it won't stop even more people from remaining angry as hell at the people who continue to send this crap out.

There have been not one but two very high profile actions in the past few weeks in the courts regarding illegal spammers. I fully expect that this is only the beginning of a long line of arrests, convictions and guilty pleas still to come. The only question is when, not if, more will take place.

SiL / IKS / concerned citizen

My Canadian Pharmacy - another illegal rogue affiliate

If you receive email, anywhere, to any account: you have likely received spam messages promoting these sites.

Up until quite recently they all followed the same pattern:

• Email messages consisting of one line of illiterate text ("nice V1@garra") followed by the link


• Web domains consisting of seemingly randomized syllables resulting in a non-language domain name ("kuderunahexadunfes.com","funhadensalinhes.com", etc.)


• Websites featuring logos for Pharmacy Checker, Better Business Bureau, CIPA, Verisign and Verified by Visa, all linking to fraudulent "supporting" statements. (Needless to say: not one of these organizations supports or authorizes any of these sites.)


• A link to a so-called "License file" which is completely fake. (It looks like something a seven year old might be fooled by.)

There has been a great deal of research done, notably by the good people over at f-secure, into the technical infrastructure of these sites, their spamming operations, and the viruses which are used to hijack pc's into their botnets for all manner of nefarious activity.

This link outlines their tracking of the recent "Warezov / Spamthru" trojan. You will notice the similarities between the domains used to spam, the domains used to download and install the trojan, the WHOIS info for all of the domains, and the domains of the websites themselves. It's a painfully obvious exposition of their entire operation, and clearly outlines their maliciously fraudulent activity. In recent days this operation has been definitively proven to be of Russian origin, and having no plans whatsoever of stopping the spamming or the operation of their illegal websites.

My own fight against this operation has taken place on two fronts: DNS cancellation (ISP's definitely don't want to be the ones on the hook for supporting this criminal activity) and order form seeding. I wrote the first "Pharmacy Expressorator™" back in March of 2006 and it has proven to be extremely effective against these sites. So much so, that I noticed in recent days: they've completely modified the entire way their back end processes work. (The sites used to be delivered via Microsoft .NET sites. Now they use Apache and PHP. Totally different product ID's, etc.) They also don't use the gibberish domain names nearly as much, resorting instead to sequential, brief domain names (22rx.com, 33rx.com, etc.) This may be a sign that they are aware of how much they seem to have exposed the inner workings of their operation.

So I have update my Pharmacy Expressorator™ and released it into the wild. It is very easy to find and is extremely useful in providing these assholes with precisely what they continue to ask us for: orders. They want them. I'm merely providing a means of fulfilling their request. They emailed me illegitimately, so I'm providing the exact same service in return. If they ever choose to work legitimately, I'll stop.

Most spam researchers have tied the Pharmacy Express series of websites back to Leo Kuvayev, yet another Russian criminal. It appears that his last known geographic location was either Montreal, Canada or London, England. But he likely has several homes around the world, all at our expense. Isn't that great?

He's also tied to the usual cadre of illegal activities these spammers love so much: money laundering, credit card and identity theft, and of course: child porn.

I will continue to provide technical and other detailed information to law enforcement around the world, as I have been for the past year or more. I want these assholes gone, and I don't care what it takes to do so.

More as it happens. Happy New Year.

SiL