Kicking A Spammer In The Nuts Daily Turns Out To Be Effective
from the at-least-so-far dept
While some people are big fans of the idea of vigilante justice against spammers, it seems only likely to lead to problems eventually. However, with companies such as IBM buying into the idea of vigilante justice on spammers, it's no surprise that the idea has built up quite a strong following. The latest effort, launched just last month, was named Kick a Spammer in the Nuts Daily (descriptive, yes?) and consists of having a ton of people fill out bogus orders on spammed sites. Brian McWilliams is now saying this method has worked against one spammer who is now begging for mercy. However, as McWilliams notes, it's unlikely most spammers will give in. Many will figure out ways around these attacks -- and they may start attacking back. And, of course, these sorts of vigilante actions way too often end up with totally innocent parties being harmed as well. While it's enjoyable to see a spammer begging for mercy, the risks of this method mean it's likely to backfire at some point.
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No Subject Given
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Re: No Subject Given
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Kick Sohrab in the nuts
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Site now illegal?
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Re: Site now illegal?
Clifford VanMeter
Techpolitics.Us
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Re: Site now illegal?
I'm not either, I'm human. However, from what I understand the new law says it's illegal to annoy people anonymously in ways that are _not protected by the First Amendment_. It is intended to make sure telephone harassment laws apply to VOIP.
In other words, no one is arguing that harassing phone calls is protected speech... and VOIP, as essentially another form of telephone, needs to be treated the same way.
Of course, that doesn't mean its not worded overly broadly or subject to abuse or just another reason for the Feds to spy on citizens or I'm just plain wrong, but that explanation makes sense to me.
(How's that for politician-like qualification of a statement?)
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Re: Site now illegal?
You want to make life hell for them and maybe put them out of business, fill in the forms with valid and totally useless information. Each form you fill out turns into a qualified lead for the advertisers. The advertiser pays for the bogus leads, and gets pissed when they find out they're bogus. Then the advertiser gets a partial refund of that month's lead bill, reducing the already paper thin margin of online advertising companies to a negative number.
Fill them in and eventually you'll bankrupt the ad company. To go even further, report the IP of each spam email you get to spamhaus.org. That 1 site caused more trouble for us (when I worked for the devil) that you can imagine, since oodles of large companies use them as a source of SMTP blacklist data.
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Re: Re: Site now illegal?
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Re: Site now illegal?
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I love it
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Re: I love it
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Re: Re: I love it
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Re: Site now illegal?
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Automated SPAM fighting
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Re: Automated SPAM fighting
It should be noted that the spammer mentioned in the article above is Alex Polyakov, out of the Ukraine... he's earned himself a Spamhaus.org ROKSO designation, and is ranked as the second largest spammer in the world.
When we band together, we can take down even the largest of spammers and make them plead for mercy. So I want you all to kick a spammer in the nuts... daily.
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But what's the point?
But really, what annoys me with vigilante justice is that there's no point, except getting a laugh out of spammers suffering (don't get me wrong, it IS satistfying!). Blue seem to have thought one step ahead, because the "global opt out list" the poor spammer that was "kicked in the nuts" here suggested is actually what Blue has been trying to do all along. Send spam to their users, don't expect any mercy. Clean their users, and you won't be touched.
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Re: But what's the point?
He's got a large money laundering operation in the US, where he 'hires' unsuspecting people, sends them money, which they put in their personal bank accounts, then draw out later and forward to the Ukraine.
He's got a large credit card theft ring in the US, and deals in tens of thousands of stolen credit cards and credit card numbers each year.
He's done several investment scams (Dornstetten Deutsche, ww.w-e-gold.com, Ryan Kelly Jungle Ventures, solidinvestment.com, etc.), and stolen a lot of people's e-gold accounts.
He's somehow connected to the Pavka/Artofit kiddie porn ring.
He's done several phishes, most of them under the name 'Foundation Men On Line'.
He is, of course, a spammer. In addition to spamming, he's running a large botnet to host some of his spamvertised sites. He tried switching his sites over to the botnet early last month in response to the high bandwidth bills he was experiencing from the SpamVampire data-draining we were putting him through... which is when we implemented the Refi Retaliator II.
He's historically accounted for ~12% to 27% of spam reported to various spam-reporting agencies. Today, he accounted for ~40% of spam reported to SpamCop...
Taking this scumbag down will do the entire world a lot of good.
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Re: But what's the point?
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Re: But what's the point?
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Re: But what's the point?
OK, phishing is scary and nasty (also deservedly criminal) but sending out dumb-ass ads for Cialis or whatever? What do I care?
It's a free country, right?
I get loads of that stuff. It goes straight into my bulk folder and I delete once every few days without looking at it.
Please explain why you're so up in arms about spam?
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Old idea, new way of doing it
I guess i just pissed them off more.
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Re: Old idea, new way of doing it
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Re: Old idea, new way of doing it
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Kicking Spammers -- Do the same to Phishers
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has to be done
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jordan is very protective of me
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hope jordan replys to this comment
love ali
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me an jordan are having a yu gi oh battle today
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i can't wait to kiss jordan
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jordan rocked me to sleep
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Why blue security works
This is nota DDoS attack, since the "attacks" are not done at the same time, plus only one e-mail is sent per mail received.
Recently a spammer tool includes the option to remove the blue security e-mails from their mailing lists, so this approach has been proven to work.
(BTW, my e-mail rickg22@reports.bluesecurity.com is not my real e-mail, it's a honeypot, send all your spam there! muahahahaha ;-) )
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Re: Why blue security works
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bluefrog not so good
_______
Hey,
You are recieving this email because you are a member of BlueSecurity (http://www.bluesecurity.com).
You signed up because you were expecting to recieve a lesser amount of spam, unfortunately, due to the tactics used by BlueSecurity, you will end up recieving this message, or other nonsensical spams 20-40 times more than you would normally.
How do you make it stop?
Simple, in 48 hours, and every 48 hours thereafter, we will run our current list of BlueSecurity subscribers through BlueSecurity's database, if you arent there.. you wont get this again.
We have devised a method to retrieve your address from their database, so by signing up and remaining a BlueSecurity user not only are you opening yourself up for this, you are also potentially verifying your email address through them to even more spammers, and will end up getting up even more spam as an end-result.
By signing up for bluesecurity, you are doing the exact opposite of what you want, so delete your account, and you will stop recieving this.
Why are we doing this?
Its simple, we dont want to, but BlueSecurity is forcing us. We would much rather not waste our resources and send you these useless mails, but do not believe for one second that we will stop this tirade of emails if you choose to stay with BlueSecurity.
Just remember one thing when you read this, we didnt do this to you, BlueSecurity did.
If BlueSecurity decides to play fair, we will do the same.
We are quite sure you will think this will not continue, that we will not continue wasting our resources doing this, feel free to wait out the first 48, or the second, and see whether these stop, you will be quite suprised.
If you have another email under the protection of bluesecurity, and have not recieved this there, do not worry, you will soon enough.
We mightve had your email addresses before in our lists, but now, we are targetting YOU, because YOU are a bluesecurity user.
You might also notice, that the BlueSecurity site(http://www.bluesecurity.com) is down..
Just remove yourself from BlueSecurity, and make it easier on you.
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Re: bluefrog not so good
This just means that BlueFrog is working. They're running scared.
And the way they're running is pretty stupid. Just report every spam they send you to BlueSecurity, and they can use that to shut down more bots. The spammers are hurting themselves even more this way.
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Blue Frog
Help! I want my frog back!
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blue frog seems to work!
Smart move.
Guess what I did first thing I had some internet time: install blue frog ap, install blue frog firefox extension, install blue frog thunderbird extension. And I will make sure to let lots and lots of people know about this wonderful little friend and hold their hands while they install.
Good thing there are still thousands of unreported spam messages in my spam folder - looking forward very much to getting more spam and reporting all of it, and then having the frog work overtime.
This is the first time in 10 years of emailing something really seems to work well against spammers - it will be some very interesting months ahead with the blue frog community growing to millions and hopefully the spammer's profits diminuishing to pennies.
So go ahead, install that frog, enjoy the feeling of DOING something against spam rather than just filtering and deleting. Don't worry about this "vigilante" and "DoS"-talk (mostly coming from the spammers themselves, but even in most media articles) - total nonsense. For every spam you get, your frog fills in one unsubscribe request. AFTER a 10-day warning. If that isnt dealing fair with spammers, what is?
Go little frog, you might be the magic solution. And if spammers find some way to block you...well at least it was worth a try and a very entertaining one at that. I got some great laughs out of those spammer threats. :-)
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Re: blue frog seems to work!
> This is the first time in 10 years of emailing something really seems to work well against spammers - it will be some very interesting months ahead with the blue frog community growing to millions and hopefully the spammer's profits diminuishing to pennies.
I believe that is why that one junkmail spammer decided to attack us rather than comply with the Do Not Intrude Registry, he could see the writing on the wall. By complying, he would only have to delete 450,000 people from his junkmail list, out of the tens of millions or hundreds of millions he must have on the list. And he knows that people who have gone through the effort of joining Blue Frog would never in a million years buy anything from a spammer, so it would cost him not a single penny to comply. But instead he chose to retaliate against our retaliation. This is definitely costing him in terms of time and effort. So why, when it would be so much easier to comply? Because when word starts getting out that Blue Frog works, EVERYBODY will join in. And he will have to quit the junkmail business and start working working for a living like the rest of us.
> Don't worry about this "vigilante" and "DoS"-talk (mostly coming from the spammers themselves, but
Right. We've got them on the run.
Odd thing, but yesterday (May 6 in my time zone) the barrage stopped as abruptly as it started. In fact, the volume of junk seems to be less than in was before the attack started, except for the repeated threats to quit Blue Frog or else. Has he decided that the best way to deal with it is to just shut up and don't raise a storm? Or is he planning something more sinister? If the latter, I am prepared to stay the course. We now have proof that the Frog really works. The only thing that can stop us from defeating junkmail now is if we back down.
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Blue Security
I would have voted for war.
If anyone has the guts and knowledge to start raising money to hire a commando squad to hunt them down, I will donate.
Let a few of the big spammers turn up dead. I bet the problem stops there.
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lc@exactsearch.biz
cs@exactsearch.biz
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get me!
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lukeyfarms@hotmail.com
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I would love to receive trash email from everyone
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I forgot to give my e-mail address
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I love spam
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