Latest South African spammers named and shamed

[rpm]

Latest SA spammers named and shamed (http://mybroadband.co.za/news/internet/18915-Latest-spammers-named-and-shamed.html)

Latest ISPA Spam Hall of Shame contains familiar names and a few new faces. How many of these names do you recognize?

[entrepr]

Scum

[Korn1]

I don't even know any of them...

[2old4this]

So, the top spammers have been the since '98/99 - does that mean this name & shame has been successful and/or - There is no Law against it in SA. How does one hit back then if you have been on their list?
Years ago, when I had ADSL & I used to receive any of those 419 scam mails; I used to rename a PDF to "Account details" & send them a good hefty 40 MB one - they had to download the entire file to get their "surprise" & I only used to do it at month end when I could see how much unused of my package I had.

[Koosi]

Those are the same old people as I saw YEARS AGO... WTF?

[rudivdw]

Just out of interest, where do you report spammers in South Africa? Does anyone know?

[uduwar]

It's Great to know who they are, but the question is how do you block them. Is there a list of the sender address/domains ?

[saixbot]

I share all ya'll sentiments, whats the point of posting this cods whollop if its the same old, same old every bleating month?
I suppose the flip side is no trees had to die publishing it.

[NathanCrow]

Well once i was also doing spammimg it drives traffic and u making some good money, well that was the past now i allow google,yahoo and msn advertising to do my spamming

[bonni]

I don't even know any of them...


Same! But we still hate all scammers!

[Romito]

The wall of shame

[deweyzeph]

What I want to know is why there is such an outcry about people spamming your email inbox, and yet currently in this country there is no way to take any action against the people who put all those junkmail leaflets into your post box every day. I think that's a far more serious problem than email spam. Every freaking day I have clear about 10 junk mail leaflets out of my post box and I don't read a single one. Why can't these people be sued?

[McT]

Many names regrettably recognised :mad: ... Savages!

[snail]

Mostly all the email i get is spam, sometimes i even reply to them and get a response, it's soooooo funny i string them along for so many days, and then i tell them im not interested ha ha ha!

[demon angel]

The SA Consumer Initiative....

Constant bombardment, but i have to thank gmails superb spam filter.

[moklet]

Looks like this hall of fame(spam) is not really stopping them, it is like the 419 scams target 10000 emails and get 1 response which makes it a lucrative effort. As long as there is no harsh (death)penalties nothing is going to stop them because obviously the model works for the spammers and they probably couldn't give a $hit about this list

Maybe they even enjoy this list and aim to be at the top

[AniV]

The Spammers who are still on the list and who are there every month are the ones that don't care. It's what they do and how they make money.

Companies who don't bother to get themselves off the list again are the kind of company/person that you shouldn't bother doing business with. It's important to remember that marketing emails are allowed. They're not illegal. If they don't have a working unsubscribe option, though, then they are considered SPAM. If you ask someone to stop sending you emails and they don't, they can be considered SPAM.

However, there have been MANY cases of companies who end up on the list, go "oh whoa, didn't know about that", contact ISPA and ask them what they need to do in order to get off the list and not have their marketing emails considered spam. These companies make the effort to fix their mailers, remove unsubscribers from their databases, and not send SPAM. It's a case of listing 1000 spammers, and getting a few to stop spamming. Just like the scammers, it's ultimately worth it to reduce SPAM by even a little by naming and shaming.

[dominic]

What I want to know is why there is such an outcry about people spamming your email inbox, and yet currently in this country there is no way to take any action against the people who put all those junkmail leaflets into your post box every day. I think that's a far more serious problem than email spam. Every freaking day I have clear about 10 junk mail leaflets out of my post box and I don't read a single one. Why can't these people be sued?

easy - you don't pay for the junk mail leaflets, you do pay for the bandwidth that delivers spam to you and a share of the associated filtering costs

[LabAnimal]

oh who cares about spam, filter it!. Surely there's better articles we can post on the front page! *Sigh*

[Antonf]

What does this achieve?

[nelwa]

Just use gmail, it catches 99.99% of spam...

[Biggie]

They should put Openweb on that spammers list.

[pjbuys]

Where is Vodacom & 8Ta

[Odly]

So, the top spammers have been the since '98/99 - does that mean this name & shame has been successful and/or - There is no Law against it in SA. How does one hit back then if you have been on their list?
Years ago, when I had ADSL & I used to receive any of those 419 scam mails; I used to rename a PDF to "Account details" & send them a good hefty 40 MB one - they had to download the entire file to get their "surprise" & I only used to do it at month end when I could see how much unused of my package I had.


Thats such a great idea...Wish there was a better way to launch a counter offensive against theses scammers. Suppose just got to be thankful for spam filters.

[mk1]

There shud be penalties for the guys who is on this list. Some shud spam them back

[GPSJane]

Spam is any unsolicited advertising mail. So if you didn't give them permission to send it to you then it is spam.

Spam filters are all very well but I still have to check mine in case normal mail ends up in there (which it does) and I find it very annoying to have to wade through piles of junk to get my normal mail.

What about sms spam? They should add that to their research!

[GPSJane]

Add Cybercellar as a reseller.

[spikeii]

I don't mind naming and shaming spammers but I don't see that it can do much. Most of their targets are not tech savvy enough to read MyBroadband.

[IvanRSA]

Article made me think of this 2005 article that went viral - "Death of a Spammer"

http://www.brianflemming.org/archives/001417.html

[essene]

www.spamcop.net is cool for reporting spam

[skybound]

Does the Protection of Personal of Information (POPI) act come into play at the same time as the new consumer protection act on 1 April 2011? That may give some legal recourse against these spammers as they are meant to then allow opt outs.

[ProSMS]

Does the Protection of Personal of Information (POPI) act come into play at the same time as the new consumer protection act on 1 April 2011? That may give some legal recourse against these spammers as they are meant to then allow opt outs.

No it does not. Hopefully it will be enacted some time this year still. The Protection of Personal Information Bill requires companies to get contact details directly from the data subject. If companies do not (ie. if they buy a list), they would need to show that those on the list gave explicit consent for that purpose.

The new Consumer Protection Act also provides some protection, provided you add yourself to the Do Not Contact database. This DNC database will override all previous explicit consent given for direct marketing and it will also apply to all companies (unlike the current DMA DNC). If a company does not check the DNC, they have to assume everyone is on the DNC.

Those companies that do check the DNC are free to send unsolicited direct marketing communications to everyone not on the DNC (at least until POPI is enacted).

Unfortunately, this DNC has only gone out to tender now, so expect another 1-2year before it becomes available.

[Kevinjennings]

Is there anyway a note can be added next to the SA Webs entry (#3) to read "(This is NOT SA Web Design)....please

We have been getting abuse for years because of SA Web's spam antics and now that they are (in)famous it could negatively impact us.

[ThinkCentre]

Do we really care? They might feel proud of themselves!

[speedfreaks]

It's Great to know who they are, but the question is how do you block them. Is there a list of the sender address/domains ?

See http://www.ispa.org.za/spam/hall-of-shame/ which list all the offenders and the relevant domains and addresses.

[Ant_Brooks]

Is there anyway a note can be added next to the SA Webs entry (#3) to read "(This is NOT SA Web Design)....please

Yes, we can definitely do that. I've just flagged this post for the attention of the person that maintains the Hall of Shame. (And my apologies for any past inconvenience caused!)

[AniV]

Spam is any unsolicited advertising mail. So if you didn't give them permission to send it to you then it is spam.

Not quite.
Spam is not when someone sends you something. They're allowed to send you marketing materials.
However, the first time you receive something from them, they have to give you, and uphold, the right to opt-out of receiving anything further from them.
If they continue to send you stuff after that, or they don't give you any way to opt out of receiving their marketing, THEN it becomes spam.

[Ant_Brooks]

Spam is not when someone sends you something. They're allowed to send you marketing materials.
However, the first time you receive something from them, they have to give you, and uphold, the right to opt-out of receiving anything further from them.
If they continue to send you stuff after that, or they don't give you any way to opt out of receiving their marketing, THEN it becomes spam.
No, that's one definition of spam -- and the one supported by the current ECT Act.

But it is far from the most generally accepted definition of spam. Wikipedia, for example reckons that "E-mail spam, known as unsolicited bulk Email (UBE), junk mail, or unsolicited commercial email (UCE), is the practice of sending unwanted e-mail messages, frequently with commercial content, in large quantities to an indiscriminate set of recipients." Nothing there about being allowed to send marketing material once before it becomes spam.

[Fearl3$$]

The List does not seem to change...

[Ant_Brooks]

Is there anyway a note can be added next to the SA Webs entry (#3) to read "(This is NOT SA Web Design)....please
This has been done.

[Tetrahedron]

Naughty naughty! Now get back in your box and leave us all alone!! :mad:

[Python009]

Scum of the earth... off with their heads!!

[freeze]

I think I may work with this guy "Trevor Jones". Wonder if he's selling the corporate mail address book (all 50,000 addresses). I'm gonna ask him on Monday :D

[Cat011]

Scum

+1

[PAYBACK]

KILL THEM ALL WITH FIRE !

[Kevinjennings]

Yes, we can definitely do that. I've just flagged this post for the attention of the person that maintains the Hall of Shame. (And my apologies for any past inconvenience caused!)

Hi
Many thanks - I appreciate the effort to assist. Any idea when this will be done as we have already started receiving complaints directed at us :(

The page I am referring to (in case the change has been made on other pages) is:
http://mybroadband.co.za/news/internet/18915-Latest-spammers-named-and-shamed.html

[Kevinjennings]

Hi
Many thanks - I appreciate the effort to assist. Any idea when this will be done as we have already started receiving complaints directed at us :)

The page I am referring to (in case the change has been made on other pages) is:
http://mybroadband.co.za/news/internet/18915-Latest-spammers-named-and-shamed.html

[nelwa]

Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.

That is a quote by George Bernard Shaw. A rather bleak outlook on the future of mankind and probably, and unfortunately, true. The reason I used it here is because I wanted to talk about spam.

In January 2004 Bill Gates promised us a world without spam within 2 years. Now, we know we should take Microsoft predictions with a grain of salt, or two, but we also know that generally they get it right the third time, right? So even with missing deadlines and a few tries to get it right they should have at least halved spam by 2008? No such luck. I have no idea what Bill was thinking about when he made that promise but it certainly didn’t pan out.

The latest estimates concerning spam are that over 98% of all email is ‘unwanted’. According to some studies a whopping 183 billion spam messages are being sent per day. Every day, 365 days a year, no breaks. In 2004 we received an average of 11 billion emails a day and someone calculated that this cost the world about 50 billion a year. We now get 16.6 times as many spam messages which would mean the cost would have risen to 830 billion a year.

$830 billion in lost time and resources. Add to that the annoyance and frustration spam can cause, even if it is distributed over small messages daily. I must admit, most spam I don’t even see. Maybe 20 or 30 messages a day get through my spam filter. About 30,000 a month are filtered out by Gmail and the many other filters I use before email reaches my inbox. Still, I can’t help but imagine what the world would be like without any spam.

So how do we get rid of spam for-good? It is all about economics really. In 2001 one spam was estimated to cost $0.10 for the receiver and $0.00001 (0.01% of the cost) for the sender. It is probably fair to say the cost of receiving has declined over the years as we have all become better at deleting it and filtering it out. Still, it is probably still very cheap to send spam.

So how do we make sending spam very expensive? How about if we would start killing spammers? I know, I know. Not really in the Christmas spirit. But come-on, we have been putting up with this **** for years now. Tolerating that 98% of all messages are spam? What are we??? Spineless?

Why can’t we just kill a few? Not even all of them, and not the amateurs, but just the really big ones. Find out where they live, and you know, shoot some. Maybe burn down a few houses and offices and trash their cars.

I must admit that I’m not the person most fit to do it. Not my style. And it would take some money too. But that is something we can all do together right? Learn from Al-Qaeda and set-up an anonymous and untraceable organization to do the actual dirty work. Don’t use paypal or mastercard to get the money together but go straight to Switzerland.

I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be hard to raise a few million within a few days. So many Internet users out there who HATE spam and would eagerly deposit $50 to be able to do something back. I’m starting to wonder why this hasn’t happened yet?

Of course there are more unconventional ways to make life hard for spammers:
1: hire 10,000 chinese girls to reply to every spam message we could find, order everything they would have for sale with fake credit cards and email them lots and lots of serious sounding bull**** questions
2: get together a hitsquad of black belt, dark ops, green beret mercenaries and hunt down each on of them. Depending on how long they have been sending email and how many I would either have them killed, tortured or just spanked really hard.
3: just make illegal anything spammers would try spamming. Cut out Viaggra and you eliminate 80% of spam anyway.

One person is trying something interesting: just sue them. Daniel Balsam is a former marketeer who found a way to make money off of spammers; sue them, then settle and use the money from the settlements to sue more spammers. So far he has made more than a million. Not bad! Annoy the bad guys, make some money in the process!

So, where do we go from here? Am I seriously asking you to start killing off spammers? Start our own little fatwā? Nah, not really. I don’t hate anyone enough to wish them death. But I do wonder how far we are going to let this go before we reach for more drastic measures. After all, Bill Gates isn’t going to solve this for us so maybe it is time we start thinking about fixing it ourselves.

*from an email a friend sent me

[Ant_Brooks]

Hi
Many thanks - I appreciate the effort to assist. Any idea when this will be done as we have already started receiving complaints directed at us :)

The page I am referring to (in case the change has been made on other pages) is:
http://mybroadband.co.za/news/internet/18915-Latest-spammers-named-and-shamed.html

Hi Kevin,

We've added a note on the actual Hall of Shame (http://www.ispa.org.za/spam/hall-of-shame/), which is under ISPA's control. We don't have any control over third party sites reporting on the HoS, so unfortunately we can't help you with changes to anyone else's site.

[mygem]

they should add National Occupational Health & Safety Consultancy <info@noshc.com>
noshc@telkomsa.net