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.

Image of a courthouse.

I’m actually surprised the FTC took action. I’m not surprised Match allowed, and possibly even encouraged, fraudulent accounts to send mail to registered users. The revenue they were making from the fraud was significant, according to Match’s own numbers.

Hundreds of thousands of consumers subscribed to Match.com shortly after receiving a fraudulent communication. In fact, Defendant has consistently tracked how many subscribers these communications have generated, typically by measuring the number of consumers who subscribe to Match.com within 24 hours of receiving an advertisement that touts a fraudulent communication. From June 2016 to May 2018, for example, Defendant’s analysis found that consumers purchased 499,691 subscriptions within 24 hours of receiving an advertisement touting a fraudulent communication. FTC Complaint (.pdf)

What doesn’t surprise me is that Match didn’t stop the outbound abuse. There are a lot of technology companies that will protect their own users and their own networks, while continuing to profit off of abuse of other networks. I’ve repeatedly talked with companies having delivery problems and pointed out that the fraud was a likely part of the delivery problems. I’ve rarely found any company that cared about fraud that was making them money.

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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.
White Collar Crime.
Sanford has been in and out of courts and the news almost as long as he’s been spamming. When I dug into Pacer this morning to grab a copy of the sentencing report I see multiple cases, some going back as far as 1996. There aren’t electronic records for Concentric Network v. Wallace, et al. (case: 5:96-cv-20829-RMW) but the final disposition of the case says “Permanent Injunction.”

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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.
White Collar Crime.
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 customers to their websites.
LeadClick and their parent company was included in the suit because the FTC alleged that they were aware of and facilitated the false claims made by their affiliates. The case went to court and LeadClick lost. They appealed to the 2nd Circuit court. Last week the 2nd Circuit Court upheld the trial court’s finding of liability for LeadClick.
In its press release for the case, the FTC says:

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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 — they’re detailed instructions that help meet specific user needs, and the more you are cognizant of that, the better you’ll be able to work with them. Additionally, filters aren’t perfect and likely never will be. False positives and false negatives are frustrating, but as long as spam is still a viable business for spammers, they’ll continue to figure out how to work around filters. As such, we can’t expect filters to be 100% accurate in determining what constitutes wanted and unwanted mail.
Part of this, of course, is due to the problem of fraudulent signups. Companies aren’t particularly vigilant about address acquisition and hygiene, and as a result, they’ll claim you “signed up” for their email when you did not. Some people believe that a confirmed opt-in (COI) will solve this problem, but our experience is companies are reluctant to leave revenue on the table, and that they will continue to mail to addresses that have not confirmed.
Address sharing and co-reg is also part of the problem. As we saw in the extensive RCM data breach, many major brands continue to work with third-party senders to send mail in ways that are quite clearly spam. And in more criminal activity, I looked at the rise of botnets and how some of those criminals were brought to justice. In other justice news, there’s been an indictment in the Yahoo breach and another CASL enforcement action.
I wrote a post about bounce handling and “relaying denied” error messages, which are quite rare. It’s useful to have an understanding of these and other error messages, since bounces are sometimes indicative of a larger technical issue, such as when AOL accidentally bounced all messages for a short period last week. Speaking of AOL, we noted that there’s no official timeline for the move from Verizon addresses to AOL addresses following the 2015 acquisition, but it may be worth considering asking your customers to update their addresses.
Spam and filters aren’t the only factors of course. It can be challenging to figure out the multiple factors that make up the black box of delivery. And of course, the most important part of delivery continues to be engagement, engagement, engagement.
I wrote a few posts this month on why I do what I do, and why it’s so important to me. First, I wrote about A Day Without A Woman, and my choice not to participate in offering advice and guidance for that day. The truth is that I enjoy sharing what I know and helping people solve problems. I was honored to be named one of 11 Innovators in Email, and I know that my volunteer work in the industry and my unpaid blogging work is a big part of that. It may sound corny, but I really do believe we are on the front lines of the fight of good vs. evil online, and despite the distractions of politics and world events, we must all continue to do our part.

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