Spammer prosecuted in New Zealand

Today (well, actually tomorrow, but only because New Zealand is on the other side of the date line) the NZ Department of Internal Affairs added a 3rd statement of claim against Brendan Battles and IMG Marketing. This third claim brings the total possible fines to $2.1 million.
Brendan is a long term spammer, who used to be in the US and moved to New Zealand in 2006. His presence in Auckland was noticed by Computerworld when a number of editors and staffers were spammed. When contacted by the paper, Brendan denied being involved in the spam and denied being the same Brendan Battles.
New Zealand anti-spam law went into effect in September 2007. The Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007 prohibits any unsolicited commercial email messages with a New Zealand connection, defined as messages sent to, from or within New Zealand. It also prohibits address harvesting.
The Internal Affairs department also appears to be investigating companies that purchased services from Brendan Battles.

Internal Affairs was still investigating businesses that had bought and used IMG databases some of which had been fined for breaching the act. Senior investigator Toni Demetriou said the sender of any commercial electronic message must have the consent of the recipient before the message was sent. stuff.co.nz

Poor Brandon. He moves to a country with no anti-spam law and then a year later they enact a law prohibiting any unsolicited email marketing.

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Winning friends and removing blocks

I do a lot of negotiating with blocklists and ISPs on behalf of my clients and recently was dealing with two incidents. What made this so interesting to me was how differently the clients approached the negotiations.
In one case, a client had a spammer slip onto their system. As a result the client was added to the SBL. The client disconnected the customer, got their IP delisted from the SBL and all was good until the spammer managed to sweet talk the new abuse rep into turning his account back on. Predictably, he started spamming again and the SBL relisted the IP.
My client contacted me and asked me to intercede with Spamhaus. I received a detailed analysis of what happened, how it happened and how they were addressing the issue to prevent it happening in the future. I relayed the info to Spamhaus, the block was lifted and things are all back to normal.
Contrast that with another client dealing with widespread blocking due to a reputation problem. Their approach was to ask the blocking entity which clients they needed to disconnect in order to fix the problem. When the blocking entity responded, the customer disconnected the clients and considered the issue closed. They didn’t look at the underlying issues that caused the reputation problems, nor did they look at how they could prevent this in the future. They didn’t evaluate the customers they disconnected to identify where their processes failed.
The first client took responsibility for their problems, looked at the issues and resolved things without relying on Spamhaus to tell them how to fix things. Even though they had a problem, and is statistically going to have the occasional problem in the future, this interaction was very positive for them. Their reputation with the Spamhaus volunteers is improved because of their actions.
The second client didn’t do any of that. And the people they were dealing with at the blocking entity know it. Their reputation with the people behind the blocking entity was not improved by their actions.
These two clients are quite representative of what I’ve seen over the years. Some senders see blocking as a sign that somehow, somewhere there is a flaw in their process and a sign they need to figure out how to fix it. Others see blocking as an inconvenience. Their only involvement is finding out the minimum they need to do to get unblocked, doing it and then returning to business as usual. Unsurprisingly, the first type of client has a much better delivery rate than the second.

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Attention is a limited resource

Marketing is all about grabbing attention. You can’t run a successful marketing program without first grabbing attention. But attention is a limited resource. There are only so many things a person can remember, focus on or interact with at any one time.
In many marketing channels there is an outside limit on the amount of attention a marketer can grab. There are only so many minutes available for marketing in a TV or radio hour and they cost real dollars. There’s only so much page space available for press. Billboards cost real money and you can’t just put a billboard up anywhere. With email marketing, there are no such costs and thus a recipient can be trivially and easily overwhelmed by marketers trying to grab their attention.
Whether its unsolicited email or just sending overly frequent solicited email, an overly full mailbox overwhelms the recipient. When this happens, they’ll start blocking mail, or hitting “this is spam” or just abandoning that email address. Faced with an overflowing inbox recipients may take drastic action in order to focus on the stuff that is really important to them.
This is a reality that many marketers don’t get. They think that they can assume that if a person purchases from their company that person wants communication from that company.

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Marketing to businesses

“If you do stupid things, you’re going to get blocked,” says Jigsaw CEO Jim Fowler in an interview with Ken Magill earlier this week.
Jigsaw is a company that rewards members to input their valuable business contacts. Once the addresses are input into Jigsaw, they are sold to anyone who wants them. Jigsaw gets the money, the people providing information get… something, the people who provided business cards to Jigsaw members get spammed and the people who downloaded the lists get to deal with a delivery mess. Sounds like a lose for everyone but Jigsaw.
Except that now Jigsaw is listed on the SBL for spam support services. Well, that’s going to cause some business challenges, particularly given how many companies use the SBL as part of their filtering scheme.
It’s hard to think of a situation where I would appreciate someone I gave a business card to providing my information to a site that then turns around and lets anyone download it to send email to. I know, I know, there are a million companies out there I’ve never heard of that have The Product that will Solve All my Problems. But, really, I don’t want them in my work mailbox. The address I give out on my business cards is, for, y’know, people to contact me about what I’m selling or to contact me about things they’ve already purchased from me. That address is not for people to market to. I have other addresses for vendors, and even potential vendors, to contact me.
Jigsaw clearly facilitates spam to businesses by collecting email addresses and then selling them on. This is a drain on small businesses who now have inboxes full of valuable offers to wade through. Perhaps their stint on the SBL will make them reconsider their spam support services.
HT: Al

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