Blacklist of Internet Advertisers

From: axel@uni-paderborn.de (Axel Boldt) Newsgroups: news.admin.net-abuse.misc,comp.mail.misc,alt.internet.services,biz.misc,alt.answers,comp.answers,news.answers Subject: Blacklist of Internet Advertisers Followup-To: news.admin.net-abuse.misc Date: 15 Nov 1995 06:03:54 +0100 Organization: Uni-GH Paderborn, Fachbereich Mathematik/Informatik Sender: axel@dali.uni-paderborn.de Message-ID: <xzqviom1nb8.fsf@dali.uni-paderborn.de> X-Newsreader: Gnus v5.0.10 Archive-name: advertisers-blacklist Posting-Frequency: every 3-4 weeks BLACKLIST OF INTERNET ADVERTISERS ========================================================================= Canter and Siegel acknowledge Blacklist's importance in recent interview: "On the day the anti-advertising vandals can convince customers not to buy from Usenet advertisements, that is the day advertising will stop." Read all at http://www.futurenet.co.uk/netmag/Features/CnS/CnS.html ========================================================================= * 1. What is this? * 2. Who gets on the list, and for how long? * 3. What is the philosophy behind it? * 4. Spam, Velveeta, ... what are you talking about? * 5. What can I do with the blacklist? * 6. What if I wanted to punish YOU? * 7. How about other ways of dealing with commercial junk? * 8. Who doesn't belong on this blacklist? * 9. How to advertise on the Internet? * 10. What other blacklists are out there? * 11. How can I help? * 12. How to give feedback? * 13. The Blacklist in itself. 1. What is this? This is the Blacklist of Internet Advertisers. It is intended to curb inappropriate advertising on usenet newsgroups and via junk e-mail. It works by describing offenders and their offensive behavior, expecting that people who read it will punish the offenders in one way or another. The list is posted regularly to several newsgroups, stored on a number of FAQ archives around the world and the most recent version is always available on the WWW as http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/BL/. Titus Brown (http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~cbrown/) is kind enough to operate a temporary mirror of the list in the US. It is updated daily and accessible as http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~cbrown/BL/ If you read the non-html version and you don't know what to do with all the links given or what the WWW is or how to access it by email, send mail to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu with the text send usenet/news.answers/www/faq/* in the body of the message. Whenever you see a link of the form "BL/something" here, you can get a valid WWW address by prepending the string "http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/" for the German version or "http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~cbrown/" for the US version of the list. 2. Who gets on the list, and for how long? People and companies who were pointed out to me for sending out unsolicited commercial e-mail or posting inappropriate commercials to usenet newsgroups or mailing lists or who offer to help in doing same. I also monitor the newsgroups news.admin.net-abuse.misc and news.admin.net-abuse.announce. With "inappropriate commercials" I basically mean ads posted to unrelated newsgroups or mailing lists or to those which traditionally don't tolerate commercial messages. The number of complaints I receive is also a factor. Everyone added to the blacklist gets notified so that they can correct possibly inaccurate information. As a general rule, people are taken off the list after 3 months unless they repeat their behavior. Their entries are then move to the archive at BL/archive.html for educational purposes. Note that the archive is not part of the blacklist as such. 3. What is the philosophy behind it? In a nutshell: the Internet is probably as close to an anarchy as we can get. This is good. Therefore, punishing of unwelcome behavior should be done by private individuals, following the same grass roots philosophy that governs the rest of the net. Read more about it in BL/blacklist_philosophy.html. 4. Spam, Velveeta, ... what are you talking about? Spam and Velveeta are two fine food products which, on the Internet, stand for certain unwelcome behaviors. Spam has its own page on the WWW: http://sp1.berkeley.edu/findthespam.html featuring a spam contest and many comments. Spam was also the main ingredient in a hilarious Monty Python sketch: ftp://suned.zoo.cs.yale.edu/lib/python/spam.Z is the transcript and ftp://ftp.cis.ksu.edu/pub/Sparcsounds/misc/spam.au.gz is the sound recording. On the Internet, spam stands for posting multiple copies of the same (or slightly altered) article to many newsgroups, without crossposting them. This means that the article will be transmitted to and stored on every usenet host multiple times: once for every newsgroup involved. EMP (Excessive Multi-Posting) is a different name for the same thing. Although we don't have a dedicated Velveeta home page yet, there's at least a cheese page at http://corsa.ucr.edu/~formy/cheese.html. On the Internet, Velveeta means the excessive crossposting of an article to many unrelated newsgroups, also known as ECP. Spam is much worse than Velveeta (try it!). Recently, more and more mixtures of the two appeared: many copies of an article, each of which crossposted to a large number of newsgroups. Some call this "jello". For the purposes of this list, I won't make a distinction between spam, velveeta and jello - if the ad ends up in a wrong newsgroup, then it is by (my) definition inappropriate advertising and will be recorded. 5. What can I do with the blacklist? If you judge that one of the described behaviors deserves some punishment, you could for example do one of the following. (Note that some of these might be illegal in some jurisdictions. Check the books first and don't blame me.) * Boycott the advertising business. Tell your friends about the boycott and the reasons behind it. * Send them or their sysadmins a message informing them that you disapprove of their behavior. If a phone number is given, you might want to try to call them collect. 1-800 numbers are also always warmly welcomed. The 1-800 directory is at http://att.net/dir800/ * If the blacklisted business is a so-called "WWW mall" which sells advertising space to other businesses, you might want to inform these advertisers about the blacklist entry and about possible consequences for their profits. * You can send a note (by registered mail) to the email junk mailers, informing them that you will charge $500 for proofreading every commercial email originating from them. If one arrives, send out an invoice, then sue them in small claims court, win, and turn the account over to a collection agency. * Put them in your kill file, so that you'll never see an usenet article written by them again. Read the documentation of your news reader about kill files. The kill mechanism of rn-style newsreaders is explained in the killfile-faq, available via anon ftp from ftp.cs.columbia.edu in the directory /archives/pub/usenet/news/answers. * Filter them out of your mailbox. If you read mail on a unix host, you can get more information about how to use the programs procmail, mailagent or filter for this task from the Mail filtering and Robots page http://www.jazzie.com/ii/internet/mailbots.html Much more in-depth, technical and comprehensive information about the information filtering problem in general is available from Doug Oard's Information Filtering Resources Page at http://www.enee.umd.edu/medlab/filter/filter.html As always, if you don't use Unix and you're not willing to spend $$$, you're screwed. * Use procmail and an AI engine like emacs doctor to engage them in a fake mail dialog. * If they operate an automatic mail-back robot, you could test their intelligence by sending them an e-mail with FROM or REPLY-TO header containing their own address. There are many other fun things one can do with these robots. * Say individuals A and B are on the list. You can send an e-mail message to B with fake FROM-header A saying "I'm interested in your product/service." In this fashion, the advertisers will end up on each other's mailing lists. * Have a look at the shell script BL/fletch.txt and reflect about possible uses :-) * If you are a system admin, you could stop forwarding mail or news originating from them. Or, if the culprit owns their own domain, you can deny them access to your ftp, gopher, telnet, irc, nntp and WWW servers. * If you operate a cancelbot, you could automatically cancel all usenet postings originating from them. Note however that the noble Cancelmoose[tm] (see point 7) strongly disapproves of this behavior. * And for the truly perverse: since the unedited texts of all ads are provided, you can use this list as the ultimate Zombie Cyber Mall[tm]. 6. What if I wanted to punish YOU? You can use some of the measures from question 5 against me. The buddies who love to hear about the progress of my work hide behind postmaster@uni-paderborn.de. If you want to do it right though, you'll have to start a Blacklist of Blacklist Maintainers. Also, please keep the threats of legal action coming - you don't do it in vain: the most amusing ones are published as BL/threats.txt while flames go to BL/flames.txt Moreover, all usenet postings concerning the Blacklist will have the word "Blacklist" somewhere in the subject line. Put it in your kill file and you won't have to hear about it ever again. 7. How about other ways of dealing with commercial junk? Here are other things you can do, short of having put people on the blacklist: * Send a complaint to them or their sysadmin directly. There's a neat script for doing that painlessly from within nn and rn-style newsreaders called adcomplain. It is posted on the first of each month to alt.sources and can also be gotten from BL/adcomplain.txt. It is a good idea to familiarize yourself with the various header fields of news articles; often it is very easy to spot if some spammer uses a bogus From-line (in which case you should still report the spam, but not complain to the wrong address). * Spam originating from AOL is very effectively dealt with by their postmaster abuse@aol.com; usually they cancel it even without having received any complaints. Spam originating at netcom should be reported to abuse@netcom.com; they are also responsive. If the anon server anon.penet.fi was used to advertise, drop abuse@anon.penet.fi a line. (Anyone interested in starting a Black/White list of Internet access providers?) * Chris Lewis cancels all spam mercilessly. Read his reports posted to news.admin.net-abuse.misc. More information about that group and net-abuse in general is contained in the FAQ, which is available as http://www-sc.ucssc.indiana.edu/~scotty/acena.html * A while back, the Cancelmoose[tm] <moose@cm.org> did all the spam canceling, but now she is working on a different approach called NoCem. You can read more about it on the Moose's homepage at http://www.cm.org/nocem.html. * If you operate you own news site, Rahul Dhesi's perl script unspam can help you in locally deleting spam - you won't have to wait for Cancelmoose[tm]'s cancel messages. However, it can't detect the spam - you need to know. It's at BL/unspam.txt. * Jonathan Kamens has recently posted his spam detector; it's at BL/spam_detect.txt. * If the offender is from the US, you can run to Mama and whine about things like illegal money making pyramid schemes or deceptive advertising. Mama in this case is the FTC: Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Protection Bureau, Division of Advertising Practices, 6th St. and Pennsylvania Ave. N.W., Washington, DC 20580, (202) 326-3090 * A nice collection of all sorts of phony scams, many of which also featured on this Blacklist, has been put together by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service at http://www.usps.gov/websites/depart/inspect/consmenu.htm * Tell business people about the netiquette, i.e. point them to everything listed under point 9, below. 8. Who doesn't belong on this blacklist? As you might have guessed, one blacklist is too small for all the assholes of the world. On a completely unrelated matter: the Church of Scientology's war against Usenet has been nicely documented by Ron Newman at http://www.cybercom.net/~rnewman/scientology/home.html Also, the common Get-Rich-Quick and Make-Money-Fast pyramid schemes don't belong on this list. They usually come from newbies who are scared to death by some 20 well-written flames, and blacklisting them would be too harsh a treatment. However, if you catch one of these idiots, you can make money fast. For details, read BL/idiots.txt. Legal information about money making pyramid schemes is available at BL/pyramid_legal.txt If you think it would be worthwhile to have a blacklist for non-commercial spams around, you'll have to start it yourself. 9. How to advertise on the Internet? My advice is: create your own WWW page and announce it once on comp.infosystems.www.announce and then try to get it listed in the various WWW libraries and indexes. Information about how to do this is at http://ep.com/faq/webannounce.html You can then publish your WWW address in paid ads in the print media as well. If you must advertise on usenet, then the biz.* and *.marketplace groups are for you (not all at once!). As a general rule, you should read every group for at least a week before you post anything there. This way, you can find out what the group is all about and whether commercials are appreciated there. Note that *.forsale groups were created to accommodate users who want to sell some personal stuff and not for commercial ads. Also: the *.marketplace groups in local hierarchies like ny.* are only for products that have a genuine connection to that area, e.g. New York; it is not sufficient that you hope that someone from New York might want to buy your product. For information about these advertising newsgroups check out the Usenet Marketplace FAQ at http://www.phoenix.net/~lildan/FAQ Never send out unsolicited commercial e-mail to individuals or mailing lists. Here is a list of documents describing the netiquette and how it relates to advertising: * Read the FAQs in the news.announce.newusers newsgroup, which are archived on ftp.cs.columbia.edu in the directory /archives/faq/news/announce/newusers. The Usenet primer by Chuq Von Rospach and the Usenet Posting Rules by Mark Horton are good places to start. * I also dug up a good article by Daniel P Dern about how to advertise on the net (must be good: has the word "Blacklist" in it): gopher://gopher.internet.com:2200/00/News/cmd-ibiz * An excellent paper explaining the rationale behind the netiquette is at BL/netmyths.html and has been contributed by Guy Berliner. * Netiquette for Usenet Site Administrators is explained by the Indiana University Support Center in http://ancho.ucs.indiana.edu/FAQ/USAGN/ 10. What other blacklists are out there? I'm aware of one blacklist operated by Pierre Beyssac <pb@fasterix.frmug.fr.net> who tries to keep the french usenet hierarchy fr.* clean of all commercials. It is written in french, posted regularly to the groups fr.news.reponses, fr.news.divers and fr.biz.d and available on the web as http://www.freenix.fr/liste-pub/. Comes with neat cost estimates for all the ads. 11. How can I help? * If you encounter an instance of offensive advertising on the internet, send me a copy (including all headers), or, even better, post it to news.admin.net-abuse.misc. If you post it, you should first browse over the last couple of Subject lines in that group to make sure that no one has reported that incident before. Then, you should use an informative Subject line yourself. (Read the charter of the group at BL/nana_charters.txt) If you send it directly to me, please check the latest version of this list first so that I won't get multiple complaints about incidents already covered. The latest version is always accessible on the WWW from http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/BL/ All contributions will be treated confidentially. * It's especially important to report all instances of unsolicited commercial junk e-mail, since these can take up more bandwidth, are more intrusive and less visible than usenet postings. * If you see an anonymously posted ad, please respond immediately and fake interest. You'll get a response, hopefully with a real e-mail address and can then report the real person behind the scam. Then send a complaint about inappropriate usage including a copy of the ad (with all the headers) to the administrator of the anon server (this would be abuse@anon.penet.fi in case anon.penet.fi was used). * If you see an ad which contains nothing but a Post Office Box number in the USA as contact address, you can get the true identity of the POB holder from the respective postmaster, if you provide them with a copy of the ad. This is the law. Let me know about what you find out in this fashion. * Please start your own blacklist, especially if you disagree with some of the rules for getting on and off this list or if you would like to focus on a particular news hierarchy. Tell me about it and I will include a pointer to it here. A blacklist of Internet access providers is badly needed. * Let me know about any creative suggestions for the answer to question 5. * The blacklist and its archive are growing constantly. I'd appreciate it if someone could write an indexing tool which would allow search based on name, geographical location or e-mail address of offender. (Preferably with a form-based html interface.) Shouldn't be too difficult since the stuff is already formatted, but I don't have the time. * Feel free to contact me if you find that any information in this document is inaccurate. * Tell people about this page. 12. HOW TO GIVE FEEDBACK? I have set up some space on the web where you can leave your comments or read and respond to other people's remarks regarding the Blacklist. It's at http://emile.math.ucsb.edu:8000/HyperNews/get/blacklist.html Please don't use that site to complain about specific advertisers. 13. THE BLACKLIST IN ITSELF I have formatted it in such a way that automatic processing becomes easy. Every entry can contain some or all of the fields ID, Name, Address, Phone, Email, Entered, Changed, Behavior, Remarks in this order. A line starting with whitespace is a continuation of the preceding line. Several Names, e-mail addresses etc. are separated by commas and optional whitespace. Blank lines separate the entries. Every entry has a unique ID so that your program can decide whether it has processed that entry before when a new list arrives. Furthermore, the original offensive article is accessible as http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/BL/<ID>.txt where the true ID is to be substituted for <ID> (or by just clicking on the ID if you read the HTML version of this document). ===Blacklist start=== ID: CS941211 Name: L. Canter, M. Siegel Address: 3333 East Camelback Road, Suite 250, Phoenix, AZ 85260, USA Cybersell, P.O.Box 13510, Scottsdale, AZ 85267, USA Cybersell, 10245 E. Via Linda, Suite 222, Scottsdale, AZ 85258, USA Phone: (602) 661-3911, (602) 661-5202 Email: 73450.3565@CompuServe.COM Entered: 1994/12/11 Changed: 1995/04/11 Behavior: The famous greencard lawyers. In 1994, they repeatedly sent out a message offering their services in helping to enter the US greencard lottery to almost all usenet newsgroups. (Note in passing: they charged $100 for their service, while participating in the greencard lottery is free and consists merely of sending a letter with your personal information at the right time to the right place.) When the incoming mail bombs forced their access provider to terminate their account, they threatened to sue him until he finally agreed to forward all responses to them. Read all about it with gopher gopher.well.sf.ca.us in Authors, Books.../Online Zines. They signed an agreement with their access provider, PSI, to refrain from sending out junk e-mail or spamming usenet. The text is available over the net as http://www.psi.com/press/Canter-Siegal-6-23.html Nevertheless, they have repeatedly spammed usenet again, although the postings were quickly found and canceled by the cancelbot Cancelmoose[tm]. PSI has cut their USENET access. They have since written a book, "How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway" and founded an internet advertising company, Cybersell. The book promotes several advertising strategies on the internet including gathering addresses from usenet and sending out junk e-mail, posting commercials to inappropriate newsgroups, advertising on irc and even via talk. They basically contend that all these behaviors are legal and therefore ok. They ridicule the terms "internet culture" and "netiquette" and claim that the internet, once all real-world laws are applied to it, will make a great source of income for attorneys. Canter & Siegel were behind the grand Credit Repair Spam and the Virtualmall spam. This finally forced their service provider, psi.com, to cut them off completely as of 1995/02/12. Update: At 1995/03/01, cyber.sell.com apparently acquired a new feed from sprint (800-669-8303). However, they can't be reached with ping yet. Sprint apparently has decided against providing access to them. On 1995/03/22, they spammed usenet again, this time with an ad for their book. A couple of interesting things to note about this one: - They spammed from two accounts, one on netcom and one on crl. The accounts have been nuked. - They put certain usenet hosts in the path line, so that their spam wouldn't reach these hosts, thereby trying to avoid the spam cancelers. To no avail, of course. - They systematically varied From and Subjet headers, again hoping to avoid being canceled. - They forged Approved-headers, so that their ad appeared in several moderated newsgroups. - The spam spilled into several mailing lists, prompting the following anti-spamming policy from the Debian mailing list: BL/debian.txt. The Water Spam, also orchestrated by C&S, shows similar characteristics. Remarks: Don't bug the owners of cybersell.com; they were the access providers for (and hence victims of) C&S during their first spam and acquired the domain name cybersell immediately - very much in the spirit of creative punishment :-) ID: AD941223 Name: Jess Guim, Advanz Home Office Companion Address: 319 East 95th Street, Dept. 2, New York, NY 10128-5761, USA Email: adhoc@ix.netcom.com Entered: 1994/12/23 Changed: 1995/01/21 Behavior: Posted their ads about desktop publishing to several rec.food groups. Advertises his tool for creating e-mail lists of potential customers via unsolicited e-mail. When complaining to him, he sends even more information about his program. Remarks: He claims to give a 30 days money-back guarantee on his products. ID: TM941223 Name: TMI Phone: voice: 408-429-5400, fax: 408-429-6100 Email: tmi@scruznet.com, info2@tmi.org, info3@tmi.org, info@tmi.org Entered: 1994/12/23 Changed: 1995/01/21 Behavior: Spammed the soc.culture hierarchy with ads for discount telephone service. Repeated it even after having been blacklisted. They recently tried to find out Cancelmoose[tm]'s spam criteria by posting a sequence of low-volume spams, which were classified as part of one big spam and hence canceled. Remarks: They have now their own domain, tmi.org, but continue to use the newsserver of scruznet.com. ID: KL950105 Name: Kevin Jay Lipsitz a.k.a. Krazy Kevin Address: 350 Richmond Terrace #5-P, Staten Island, NY 10301 PO Box 990, Staten Island, NY 10312 Phone: 718-967-1234, 718-967-1550 (fax), 718-967-1144 (fax) Email: krazykev@escape.com, krazykev@kjl.com lipsitz@ingress.com Entered: 1995/01/05 Changed: 1995/10/30 Behavior: Spammed almost the whole usenet repeatedly with anonymous ads (Hi, my name is Anne Nelson...") for a long distance calling plan. He was warned by the admin of the anon server, then lost his account there and did it again with a new account. He told me on the phone that a company called Card Call USA, INC. 6232 N. 7th ST. #109 Phoenix, AZ 85014 Phone: 602-264-7000 Fax: 602-266-0687 uses a pyramid-like promotion scheme where every customer gets a commission for each new customer they bring and in turn for each new customer these new ones bring and so on up to level 7. Kevin Lipsitz is a customer of Card Call USA and tries to bring new customers to get these commissions. His using the anon server is evidence enough that he knew that he was doing something wrong. Incidentally, he sent me the membership application for CC USA. Point #6 of the contract, which Kevin most probably signed, reads: "6. I agree to operate in a lawful, ethical, and moral manner and to do nothing that will adversely reflect upon CCUSAI, its clients or its other Independent Sales Representatives. I understand that any act deemed by CCUSAI to be detrimental to CCUSAI, in any manner, is grounds for the termination of my status as Independent Sales Representative and all corresponding commissions." As of 1995/02/20, he uses the new e-mail address at escape.com. On 1995/02/26, he anon-spammed again, this time advertising his magazine club. It occurred again on 1995/03/04. As of 1995/04/28, he owns his own domain kjl.com. This is nothing but a bunch of mailboxes on escape.com. Apparently, escape got tired of the complaints. Complaints should properly go to root@escape.com, since root@kjl.com is Kevin himself. He is also the source of the ubiquitous "===>> World's *Cheapest* Way to get USA Magazine Subscriptions..." postings. There have been complaints that he doesn't deliver all ordered magazines. He has started to send his ads to mailing lists also. Remarks: I tracked him down by answering to one of his ads using an old e-mail address, to which he promptly responded. The second time, I responded again to his anon ad, and he apparently recognized me and tried to harass me over the phone. Next was a truly pathetic first attempt at mailbombing. [Kevin, next time pick an ftpmail service without per day traffic limits, jeeez] His account on panix.com is no more. An excellent analysis of one of his recent postings and lots of personal information about him is at BL/kl_info.txt Recently, several articles about him, including cancel reports, have been canceled from news.admin.net-abuse.misc. ID: KK950105 Name: Kim Kerns, Applied Information Technologies, Inc. Address: POB 2634, Midlothian, VA 23113, USA Phone: 704-559-5988, 800-576-5146, 804-378-8050 Email: applied@vnet.net, BYNH09A@prodigy.com, lorcine@aol.com Entered: 1995/01/05 Changed: 1995/01/09 Behavior: Spammed many newsgroups with a long distance calling plan. Varied subject lines, posting sites and exact text, apparently to avoid cancelbots. The company selling the phone service is Applied Information Technologies, Inc., POB 2634, Midlothian, Va. 23113. This company employs a promotion scheme offering commission to every customer for each call people sponsored by them make. After being blacklisted and notified about it, he did it again repeatedly. Remarks: Note the 1-800 number. He doesn't seem to own vnet, so you can put pressure on his postmaster. ID: CY950121 Name: Cybergear Address: 2770 St. Albans NW, North Canton, Ohio 44720, USA Email: cybergear@delphi.com Entered: 1995/01/21 Changed: 1995/10/30 Behavior: Posted their ad for t-shirts to at least 30 unrelated newsgroups, sometimes changing the subject to avoid canceling and to make the postings technically on-topic. Did it again on 95/02/05. And again in May. ID: BO950212 Name: Stuart Bar-On, Parallel Performance Group Address: 450 Jordan Rd., Suite E, Sedona, AZ 86336, USA Phone: (520) 282-6300 (voice), (520) 774-0896 (fax) Email: ppg@ppgsoft.com, ppginc@shell.portal.com ppginc@earth.usa.net, ppg@primenet.com, strand@ppg.strand.com ppg@unicomp.net, info@ppginc.com ppg@ppgsoft.com, news@ppginc.com Entered: 1995/02/12 Changed: 1995/10/30 Behavior: Engage in a large-scale junk e-mail assault. Sent out unsolicited e-mail ads to postmasters, who were supposed to forward it to their "Marketing Directors". They got the addresses from InternNIC's list of registered domain names. In addition, they gathered e-mail addresses from usenet postings and sent unsolicited commercial e-mail to those. A new junk e-mail wave occurred around 1995/02/28. This time from unicomp.com. I suspect that they scan usenet postings for certain Organization-lines in the header. Remarks: Their mail-bots and WWW pages are maintained by zoom.com. In addition, the domain name ppgsoft.com is owned by Bar-On but is nothing but a bunch of mailboxes on stealth.romoidoy.com. The domain ppginc.com, also owned by Bar-On, contains only a couple of mail-bots residing on unicomp.net. ID: CL950228 Name: Cyberlink Inc. and various agents Address: 5855 Topanga Canyon Blvd., #520, Woodland Hills, CA 91367, USA Phone: 818-702-0456 (fax), 216-461-1770 (fax), 216-231-2857 (voice) 800-266-2006 (voice) Email: mvs3@po.CWRU.Edu, MRN@WVNVAXA.WVNET.EDU, 75017.605@CompuServe.COM, cyberlink@infomat.com, fy755@cleveland.Freenet.Edu Entered: 1995/02/28 Behavior: Persistent, slow spam of soc.culture.* groups, advertising some long distance plan. Apparently, Cyberlink pays commissions to agents who brings new customers, and several of their agents spam. It's unclear whether Cyberlink is aware of that. They need to change their rules. Remarks: cyberlink@infomat.com seems to be an automatic mail-back robot. ID: WC950415 Name: WWCD Inc., Steve Schall Phone: (410) 581-1110 Email: wwcd@wwcd.com, t-rock@access.digex.net, steve@wwcd.com Entered: 1995/04/15 Behavior: Repeatedly posted announcements of their WWW server on a large number of sports related newsgroups. Respond to complaints with flames. Put at least 41 links to their server on The-Mother-of-all BBS at http://www.cs.colorado.edu/homes/mcbryan/public_html/bb/summary.html Remarks: Access provider is digex.net. ID: JS951030 Name: Jeff Allen Slaton, a.k.a. SpAmKiNg Address: 6808 Truchas Drive NE, Albuquerque, NM 87109 Phone: (505) 821.1945 (fax/data modem) Entered: 1995/10/30 Behavior: Persistent and large scale email and usenet spam. Sometimes wants $5 for taking someone off his mailing list. His messages usually contain ads for other businesses, but sometimes also illegal money making pyramid schemes. Always uses fake From lines, sometimes in order to punish past access providers. He announced that he would get a T1 internet connection through MCI in order to annoy them. Some articles on news.admin.net-abuse.misc criticizing him have been canceled by an anonymous party. Remarks: A web page containing personal information complete with Social Security Number, photo, phone number of his employer, and much more is at http://www.emerald.net/soren/spamking/. Some more information about where he lives is at BL/slaton_personal.txt. Please complain to the businesses advertising on his mass mailings and boycott them. He is probably connected to the net through a SLIP or PPP connection provided by InterRamp; they are unresponsive. ID: SH951030 Name: Sam Hopkins Phone: 800-746-6283 Email: root@pgh.nauticom.net, future21@pgh.nauticom.net Entered: 1995/10/30 Behavior: Email spam to many web administrators. Trying hard to sound genuinely interested in the web site, but failing. ID: PB951030 Name: Peter Bruce, Resampling Stats Address: 612 N. Jackson St. Arlington, VA 22201 Phone: 703-522-2713 (voice), 703-522-5846 (fax) Email: postmaster@qcnet.com, stats@cais.com Entered: 1995/10/30 Behavior: Persistent email spam about some statistical textbook. Remarks: He owns qcnet.com; complaints should go to postmaster@cais.com because they are the access providers. ID: CJ951030 Name: Clark Johnson, JEM Computers, JEM Bargains Email: clark@jembargains.com, sales@jembargains.com Entered: 1995/10/30 Behavior: Email spam about computer hardware with Subject "Hi". ID: IC951030 Name: IntraNet Cyber Products Address: P.O.B. 18016, Clearwater, FL 34622 Entered: 1995/10/30 Behavior: Large scale email spam advertising a tape "first whispered about on college campuses". Remarks: The spam was injected from chisp50.slip.net and some other machines in that domain by an unknown party, most probably Jeff Slaton. They contain bogus Message-id headers pointing to interramp.com, in an apparent move to try to punish them. A "surrender" of the advertiser was mailed to the Telcom Editor and is available at BL/IC_surrender.txt. It looks like a scam to me (especially since it contains more advertising for his tape), but judge for yourself. ID: NB951030 Name: 900# Business Phone: (801) 221-1163 Ext.900 (fax on demand) Email: postmaster@socketis.com Entered: 1995/10/30 Behavior: Repeated spam of unrelated groups with an ad for 900 numbers. ID: NA951030 Name: NaSPA, Association for Corporate Computing Technical Professionals Address: 7044 S. 13th Street, Oak Creek, WI 53154, USA Phone: (414) 768-8000 (voice), (414) 768-8001 (fax) Email: mbrship@nascom.com Entered: 1995/10/30 Behavior: Spam of unrelated groups and unsolicited email with an offer to join their association. Thanks, but no thanks. ID: NL951030 Name: NiTeLife Phone: 212-740-8235 (modem) Entered: 1995/10/30 Behavior: Repeated and widespread spam advertising a BBS. Remarks: Have been spamming from Interramp, Cyberden, and other places. Return mail was directed to a throw-away AOL account which has since been terminated. intermac.com provides them with internet access. ID: CD951030 Name: The CDCellar Address: PO Box 340324, Dayton, OH 45434, USA Email: cdcellar@dnaco.net Entered: 1995/10/30 Behavior: Repeated spam of all music groups with an announcement for their www site. ID: EC951030 Name: Enviro Chemical Address: 29 SW 5th St., Pompano Beach FL 33060, USA Phone: 954-784-9511 Email: 76503.3066@CompuServe.COM, EFX2000@AOL.COM Entered: 1995/10/30 Behavior: Spammed numerous unrelated newsgroups with an ad for their internet anti censorship t-shirt. Were aware that this was inappropriate. ID: CY951030 Name: Cyberden, Peter Stone Address: PO Box 150465, San Rafael CA 94915, USA Phone: 510-636-9525 (voice), 510-633-9811 (modem) Email: bat@cyberden.com Entered: 1995/10/30 Behavior: Spammed usenet with announcements for their WWW site. Remarks: Here are Peter's comments: BL/CD_response.txt ID: PD951030 Name: Prime Data WorldNet E!Mail, Vernon Hale Address: 1132 Richards Rd, Bowling Green, Ky 42104, USA Phone: (502)529-9106 (fax), (502)529-9304 (voice) Email: worldnet@pwrnet.com, cybrcash@ix7.ix.netcom.com, prime@mwci.net Entered: 1995/10/30 Behavior: Send out junk email newsletters with third party ads on them. Some people received the newsletter again even after having asked to be removed. Remarks: Please complain also to the individual advertisers listed. They have already lost an account on mwci.net because of complaints. In the past, they have used toc.net to inject the messages. They also maintain accounts on valleynet.net. The admins of both valleynet.net and toc.net don't see anything wrong with junk email and won't remove his account. ID: EA951030 Name: Email America Co. Address: 626 Santa Monica Blvd. Phone: 310-967-4070 Email: emaillists@aol.com, intelis@wavenet.com Entered: 1995/10/30 Behavior: Offer bulk email lists for advertising use. ID: HA951030 Phone: 800-555-8655 Entered: 1995/10/30 Behavior: Spam about pentadecanoic acid. Remarks: Originated from luc.edu ID: IT951030 Name: InterConnect TeleCard Inc. Address: 4691 N. University Drive, Suite 202, Coral Springs Fl. 33067, USA Phone: iti@igc.net Email: 305-344-5076 Entered: 1995/10/30 Behavior: Spam about "No cost long distance plan". Yeah, right. One week later, they spammed again in order to find independent marketing representatives for said plan. They want someone else to do the dirty work. ID: JJ951030 Name: Jim Joyce Phone: (206) 233-8517 Email: jim@info.oaktreex.com, 102640.200@COMPUSERVE.COM Entered: 1995/10/30 Behavior: Repeated, large scale junk email about computer hardware. Remarks: He owns oaktreex.com; access is provided by inetusa.com. ID: LA951030 Name: LagdenVisa Email: LagdenVisa@AOL.Com, 76065.1337@Compuserve.com, Lagden@ix.netcom.com Entered: 1995/10/30 Behavior: Spam about the Greencard lottery. The good old times! Remarks: The mentioned greencard lottery DV-97 does not yet exist. ID: WR951030 Name: Walt Richardson Phone: 800-488-0319 Email: icarus@halcyon.com Entered: 1995/10/30 Behavior: Spammed ad for "Leadership Training". ID: ES951030 Name: ECS Consulting Inc., Pat Gillespie Email: patgil@bconnex.net Entered: 1995/10/30 Behavior: Posts weekly ads about Internet Marketing Business to local unrelated newsgroups. ID: GR951030 Name: Guy Richard Email: tradex@fla.net Entered: 1995/10/30 Behavior: Spammed many unrelated groups with an ad for his internet service. ID: SS951030 Email: sshow@prysm.com Entered: 1995/10/30 Behavior: Spam about PC software. ID: US951030 Name: USTech Email: ustech@haven.ios.com Entered: 1995/10/30 Behavior: Spam about PC software, going to unrelated groups. Remarks: ios.com seems to be unresponsive. ID: MD951103 Name: Michael Dudley, Compass Callback Company Phone: 617-321-1550 (voice), 617-321-6437 (fax) Email: compas@tiac.net Entered: 1995/11/03 Behavior: Repeated spam about callback schemes, assisted by Jeff Slaton. They advertise using a pyramid like setup. Remarks: Report about a conversation with Michael is at BL/MD_info.txt ID: PP951103 Name: Database Communications Email: powerpub@internetMCI.COM, dbase@internetmci.com Entered: 1995/11/03 Behavior: Spam about envelope stuffing scam. ID: LP951103 Name: Life Plus, M. Lantz Phone: 800-572-8446, 800-214-1233, 800-214-1233, 206-776-1258, 206-771-4270 Email: mike42@nwlink.com Entered: 1995/11/03 Behavior: Spam advertising miscellaneous drugs and a pyramid like advertising scheme. ID: LL951103 Name: Lorrin L. Lee Address: 1750 Kalakaua Ave 3140, Honolulu HI 96826-3795, USA Phone: 808-949-5000 (voice), 808-947-8817 (fax) Email: lorrin@aloha.net Entered: 1995/11/03 Behavior: Spam about how to make money on the internet. ID: DT951103 Name: DTP Products Phone: 334-973-9721 Email: dtp@python.viper.net, dtp@mindspring.com, Movieman5@aol.com Entered: 1995/11/03 Behavior: Spam to 792 groups about their new internet access offering. Off to a great start! ID: RU951103 Name: Rudolph Email: rudolph@ns2.icon.net Entered: 1995/11/03 Behavior: Spammed their WWW site announcement. ===Blacklist end=== _________________________________________________________________ Last changed: 14-Nov-95 Copyright 1994, 1995 by Axel Boldt <axel@uni-paderborn.de>. You can do with it whatever you want, unless you are blacklisted here.

Send corrections/additions to the FAQ Maintainer:
axel@uni-paderborn.de (Axel Boldt)

Last Update August 06 1997 @ 02:05 AM

faq-admin@faqs.org