Political Fraud & Spam

The Conservative Party is one of the largest political parties in the UK. They’re center-right politically (by European standards), nationalist and pro-business. You’ll often see them called the Tory party or Tories – a pejorative nickname they acquired 350 years ago.
While they’re part of the ruling coalition today, there’s a general election coming up in the next couple of weeks and they’re, well, campaigning aggressively. A group of 500 small business owners co-signed a letter to the Telegraph (a mainstream UK newspaper that supports the Conservatives consistently enough that it’s widely known as the Torygraph) expressing strong support for Conservative economic policies and drumming up votes for the election.
So far, nothing unusual. So why am I talking about it? And why am I talking about it here, on an email blog?
As people began to look at the letter, the story began to unravel. First, the letter was published on the Telegraph website as  a PDF – and the PDF metadata showed it had been written by the Conservative’s press office, not a group of small businesses.
 
https://twitter.com/GabrielScally/status/592476275362529280
 
Then it turned out that many of the signatories seemed to have signed it multiple times, each representing slightly different company names. Somebody didn’t dedupe their purchased list, it seems.
When contacted, many of the signatories denied signing anything. Several of them did mention receiving email (spam?) and clicking on a link.

I am beginning to have very serious doubts as to how many of even the legitimate businesses on the list actually signed anything. Aurum Solutions have issued a statement. Their sales director received an email from Brady “and recalls clicking on the link to find out more”. That’s it. He does not recall signing anything and denies strongly providing any information about the company. Could it be that this was merely an aggressive piece of spamming, where database entries referring to people and their workplace were signed up to this shambles at the mere click of the link?
— Alex Andreou (SturdyBlog)

So it seems to have been a poorly targeted email campaign – apparently some part of which was spam to purchased addresses given the recipients – that used the personal information of people who clicked through as signatories on a piece of political theatre.
There’s a lot more data and discussion at SturdyBlog and also a storify of some of the relevant tweets. The “Grant Shapps” you see mentioned throughout is the SEO Spammer / Conservative Party Chairman.
What’s the email-related message to take away from all this?

  • Political email campaigns stretch – and break – the boundaries of acceptable behaviour worldwide, not just in the US
  • Just because someone has an email address @example.com does not mean they can speak on behalf of Example Corporation
  • If you behave deceptively and annoy enough people someone will uncover and publicise your deception
  • Uninformed clickthrough is not consent

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I mentioned yesterday one of the major political blogs launched their mailing list yesterday. I pointed out a number of things they did that may cause problems. Today, I discovered another problem.
This particular blog has been around for a long time, probably close to 10 years. It allows anyone to join and create their own blogs and comment with registered users. As part of their new mailing list, they added everyone who has ever registered to their mailing list. They did not send a “we have a new list, want to join it?” email, they added every registered user to the list and said “you can opt out if you want.”
This is such a bad idea. My own account was used once, to make one comment, back in 2005. Yes, 2005. It’s been almost 5 years since I last logged into the site. Sure, I have email addresses that go back that far, but not everyone does. That list is going to be full of problems: dead addresses, spamtraps, duplicates, unengaged and uninterested.
Seriously, they’re adding people who’ve not logged into their site in 5 years to a mailing list. How can this NOT go horribly wrong?
My initial thought was this was going to blow up in a week. I’m now guessing they’ll start seeing delivery problems a lot sooner than that.

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I occasionally consult for activists using email. Their needs and requirements are a little different from email marketers. Sure, the requirements for email delivery are the same: relevant and engaging mail to people who requested it. But there are complicating issues that most marketers don’t necessarily have to deal with.
Activist groups are attractive targets for forged signups. Think about it, when people get deeply involved in arguments on the internet, they often look for ways to harass the person on the other end of the disagreement. They will often signup the people they’re disagreeing with for mailing lists. When the disagreements are political, the logical target is a group on the other side of the political divide.
People also sign up spamtraps and bad addresses as a way to cause problems or harass the political group itself. Often this results in the activist group getting blocked. This never ends well, as instead of fixing the problem, the group goes yelling about how their voice is being silenced and their politics are being censored!!
No, they’re not being silenced, they’re running an open mailing list and a lot of people are on it who never asked to be on it. They’re complaining and the mail is getting blocked.
With that as background, I noticed one of the major political blogs announced their brand new mailing list today. Based on their announcement it seemed they that they may have talked to someone who knew about managing a mailing list.

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