Boris Mizhen is once again on the wrong side of legal action. This time it’s not as simple as Microsoft suing him for creating hundreds of thousands of accounts to try and game the spam scoring system. Instead, he seems to have run afoul of the FTC. This case isn’t obviously about email, but the FTC alleges that companies under the “control or influence” of Boris set up a...
How can companies avoid paying spammers and having their brand associated with spammers? One of the easiest ways to avoid spam is to not pay for acquisition email. Simply don’t set up an affiliate email marketing program. There are a lot of folks who don’t like me saying that, and who have argued vociferously with me over the years. But email is not a good medium for acquiring new...
Over the last week Steve and I have posted about the AARP hiring affiliates to send spam on their behalf: starting with the poorly done email message, moving through the process of identifying the responsible entity and then walking through the details of how we tracked the spammer. Why spend a week writing about the AARP spamming? I initially posted about the AARP spam because it was such a...
or Why All Of This Is Meaningless: Guest post by Huey Callison The analysis of the AARP spam was nice, but looking at the Mainsleaze Spammer Playbook, I can make a few educated guesses at what happens next: absolutely nothing of consequence. AARP, if they acknowledge this publicly (I bet not) has plausible deniability and can say “It wasn’t us, it was an unscrupulous lead-gen...
Yesterday I wrote about spam I received advertising AARP and used it as an example of a mainstream group supporting spammers by hiring them (or hiring them through proxies) to send mail on their behalf. My statement appears to have upset someone, though. There is one comment on the post, coming from an IP address allocated to the AARP. This isn’t from AARP…this is a SPAM that’s been going around...
I received spam advertising AARP recently. Yes, AARP. Oh, of course they didn’t send me spam, they hired someone who probably hired someone who contracted with an affiliate marketer to send mail. The affiliates, while capable of bypassing spam filters, are incapable of actually sending readable mail. That’s actually how the message appeared in my mail client: totally unreadable images...
Eric Goldman published his notes on affiliate liability from his talk at SMX West. He mentions some cases where a company was sued under CAN SPAM. Unlike general legal statutes, where non-agents cannot create liability for a company, under CAN SPAM companies are liable for the actions of their advertisers. Despite this statutory difference, both the FTC and private litigants have had difficulty...
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