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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Affiliates can be liable for fraud

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August 2015: The month in review

It’s been a busy blogging month and we’ve all written about challenges and best practices. I found myself advocating that any company that does email marketing really must have a well-defined delivery strategy. Email is such vital part of how most companies communicate with customers and potential customers, and the delivery landscape continues to increase in complexity (see my post on pattern matching for a more abstract look at how people tend to think about filters and getting to the inbox). Successful email marketers are proactive about delivery strategy and are able to respond quickly as issues arise. Stay tuned for more from us on this topic.
I also wrote up some deliverability advice for the DNC, which I think is valuable for anyone looking at how to maintain engagement with a list over time.  It’s also worth thinking about in the context of how to re-engage a list that may have been stagnant for a while. A comment on that post inspired a followup discussion about how delivery decisions get made, and whether an individual person in the process could impact something like an election through these delivery decisions. What do you think?
As we frequently point out, “best practices” in delivery evolve over time, and all too often, companies set up mail programs and never go back to check that things continue to run properly. We talked about how to check your tech, as well as what to monitor during and after a send. Josh wrote about utilizing all of your data across multiple mail streams, which is critical for understanding how you’re engaging with your recipients, as well as the importance of continuous testing to see what content and presentation strategies work best for those recipients.
Speaking of recipients, we wrote a bit about online identity and the implications of unverified email addresses in regards to the Ashley Madison hack and cautioned about false data and what might result from the release of that data.
Steve’s in-depth technical series for August was a two-part look at TXT records — what they are and how to use them — and he explains that the ways people use these, properly and improperly, can have a real impact on your sends.
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