Tagfraud

Profiting off spam

The FTC filed suit against Match.com for using fake accounts to entice people into signing up for accounts. (WA Post) Part of the FTC’s allegations include that Match flagged the accounts and prevented them from contacting paying Match users while simultaneously allowing the users to contact free Match users. I’m actually surprised the FTC took action. I’m not surprised Match...

March 2017: The Month in Email

It’s that time again… here’s a look at our last month of blog posts. We find it useful to recap each month, both to track trends and issues in email delivery and to provide a handy summary for those who aren’t following along breathlessly every single day. Let us know if you find it useful too! As always, I wrote about email filters. It’s so important to recognize that filters aren’t arbitrary...

September 2016: The month in email

Happy October, everyone. As we prepare to head to London for the Email Innovations Summit, we’re taking a look back at our busy September. As always, we welcome your feedback, questions, and amusing anecdotes. Seriously, we could use some amusing anecdotes. Or cat pictures.   We continued to discuss the ongoing abuse and the larger issues raised by attacks across the larger internet...

Affiliates can be liable for fraud

An article popped up on LinkedIn about a recent 2nd court of appeals ruling that I thought was interesting. Back in 2011, the FTC and the state of Connecticut filed suit against a company called LeanSpa and their affiliate marketer called LeadClick. LeanSpa sold various diet products through negative option marketing. LeadClick was the affiliate company they used to help drive traffic and...

Sanford Wallace goes to Jail

Sanford Wallace has been sentenced to 2 years in jail by the US District court in San Jose for contempt of court and electronic mail fraud. Sanford has been around for more than 2 decades. He is one of the spammers that drove me to learn how to read headers and report spam back in the late nineties. Sanford has been in and out of courts and the news almost as long as he’s been spamming...

Fraud, terms of service and email marketing

Here at the Atkins house we’re still both recovering from the M3AAWG plague. I don’t know what it was that we shared during the conference, but it’s knocked many folks over. I don’t have a lot to blog about this afternoon so I was looking through some of my old blog posts to get at least some content up before I give up for the weekend. I found an old post about permission...

Facebook scams move to LinkedIn

There’s a fairly common Facebook scam where someone clones an account, then sends out friend requests to friends of that person. This actually happened to a friend over the holiday break. The only problem was that most of the folks who got friend requests were actually security people. Security people who thought it was very, very funny to play along with said scammer. The scam account...

Seedy underworld

ESPs have to deal with spammers, phishers and scammers getting onto their networks. Mailgun talks about some of the things they’ve found our about these problem customers.

Spamming to hide fraud

An interesting article at NetworkWorld last month, describing spam bombs to victims of fraud and identity theft to hide the transactions and notifications from financial institutions. The targets are individuals, whose identity and personal information the thieves already have. The victims’ email inboxes suddenly get flooded with thousands upon thousands of emails — as many as 60,000...

Guilty of violating CAN SPAM

Al Ralsky has long been known as “the king of spam.” He has a long history of spamming, suing ISPs who block his mail and refusing to provide him with connectivity. He was profiled in the Detroit Free Press based on his spamming activity more than 5 years ago. He also has a history of convictions for fraud and other related crimes. Yesterday, he and some of his family and business...

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