 Trust the Midas touch?
Monday, 16 June 2008
I received this “mainsleaze” spam a few days ago from Midas. Now this is supposed to be a reputable, mainstream company but stupid actions such as this are likely to damage their reputation for quite a while:
Looking at the email headers and body reveals that apart from “dataxlt.com”, “online-replies.com” and “expressdataonline.net” are also somehow involved:
From: “Your Local Midas Dealer” <midas@online-replies.com>
To: xxx@lutrov.com
Date: Sun, 08 Jun 2008 13:03:54 -0700
Subject: Your Springfield Midas would like to communicate with you.
Return-Path: <bounce@expressdataonline.net>
While I haven’t received a reply from the folks at Midas, I suspect that this has nothing to do with them for the following reasons:
- My name is obviously not “Cheri” and never has been.
- I don’t live in the USA and never have.
- The three domains - dataxlt.com, online-replies.com and expressdataonline.net are all registered to an outfit called “Wild West Domains, Inc”, which just sounds dodgy.
- The email content was HTML only, which is often a sign of unprofessionalism.
- The message pretends that it’s not spam by asking for permission to send you offers and stuff.
Surely an established organisation like Midas wouldn’t risk their good name on a “campaign” like this?
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First off, my mother just got one of these Midas emails that not only had her name correct in the "TO:" area of the header, but also had my wife's name in the greeting of the letter, and had the city we live in correct (my mother is 1400 miles away!).
Wild West Domains is NOT the owner of these domains, nor are they the company that sent you the email. They are a domain registrar that also provides a privacy service to people who buy domains through them. What they do is offer the service for an extra wad of cash for each domain you want to hide. Wild West Domains then hides your contact information for the domain so the average WHOIS lookup cannot see who the actual owner of the domain is. Pretty much guaranteeing them the ability to work and send you SPAM in complete anonymity.
They do this so the average person (you and me) cannot innundate them with email and/or phone calls to their office (or shed in their backyard) telling them to stop sending you this stuff.
Emailing the word UNSUBSCRIBE to the address provided wil most likely NOT get you removed from the list, but it will tell this mystery company (or person living in their parent's garage) that the email address is valid, and they have carte blanche to send you more crap. Then they will sell this validated list of email address to someone else so you can receive even more garbage.
Just have these emails send to you junk folder and try to foget about them. That is about all you can do outside of getting a court order for Wild West Domains to give up the company's information.
Tom
After a little more research, I have found THIS COMPANY which is part of the whole spammer regime for these Midas ads...
http://www.acquirelocal.com
They even have a "Privacy Policy" which includes this text:
"Anti-Spam Statement AcquireLocal practices permission-based email marketing and as such complies with all aspects of the Federal CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, http://www.spamlaws.com/federal/108s877.html "
Yee ha!
Tom
Tom, thanks for your contribution to this topic. To this date, I still haven't heard back from Midas, so I should just assume they're not prepared to confirm or deny that it was them who sent the spam.
But I won't, as I still doubt it was them. I guess they're just too busy to answer, even after 1 month. That level of slothfulness is however a good future topic, which I'll keep in mind.
What led you to the conclusion that AcquireLocal are the scumbags behind the Midas "campaign" in this instance?