Yahoo hates the spam, loves the spammer

First, unless you are selling pictures of Paris Hilton with her clothes on, stop spamming me telling me you are going to show her like I have never seen before.

And now on to Yahoo.

Yahoo loves to say they Hate Spam. They even like to say they are working on ways to stop spam.

Well I am going to save millions of dollars of research for yahoo. Want to stop a bunch of spam, yahoo? Stop hosting spammers.

Yahoo, is alot of things, portal, webdirectory, free email account blah blah blah. A regular powerhouse. They also sell web hosting. You might know them as those really ugly web stores. We have all seen them, ugly menu on the left, ugly cart, junky merchants. Some merchants fancy up their site, but at the heart is just another yahoo store.

You can see the great deal yahoo is here - $99/month 1% transaction fees. In case you are thinking, wow a merchant account that only charges 1%, think again. That 1% is on top of any other merchant fees you have, that is 1% for the sheer joy of having a yahoo store.

So why would anyone pay so much for a hosting account? Bullet proof web hosting. It doesn't come cheaper than this anywhere else in the USA.

I will give you just-bargains.com as an example of Yahoo allowing a merchant hosting company to spam away with zero repercussions (Don't worry, they also allow their cheapie geocities sites to spam).

But back to Just Bargains, I received about 20 pieces of spam from them for their Digital Camera Binoculars. Checking their whois, you can see the yahoo dns. And their IP (66.218.79.169) is owned by Yahoo as well.

So I reported the spam to yahoo. Now, everyone with a pc can do a quick tracert or whois on the ip and see it is owned by Yahoo and we are not even official abuse workers, just mere regular Internet users. Well this ability seems to be beyond yahoo's abuse team. Here is their reply:

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.

The web address referenced in the email message you have received is
forged and is in no way affiliated with Yahoo!.

Unfortunately, we are unable to preempt the misuse of our name in the
case of forgery. Individuals are strongly discouraged from forging the
Yahoo! domain and we will take appropriate action as necessary.

Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.

Regards,

Yahoo! Customer Care

The real kicker? This is the url included in the spam.
http://store.yahoo.com/cgi-bin/clink?yhst-##REMOVED##+K2pnmy+binos.html

Yep. In no way affiliated with yahoo. No affiliation whatsoever. In fact, I heard this link has nothing to do with yahoo as well. Damn sneaky spammers.

But this is not near the worst for yahoo.

Here is some fun spam I emailed them about a UnsubscribeNow.org. A spammer who warns you that your email address is circulating among spammers. Sure it is, that is what he is and he is sending you spam, so no lie there.

For only $21.95, he will remove your name from his own list I guess? Or do you think this one man really has control over every spammer worldwide and will be able to stop spam from you?

Who knows. But that is what his service offers.

What I do know, I would be hesitant to send my money to Alexey, a Russian based spammer who on his order form says he uses geotrust SSL, but in fact offers no encryption to any credit information you send his way. Go ahead and fill out his order form, never once does a lock appear in your browser. You can stick in any information you want, I would just suggest not submitting your real info, but you can smash away at the keyboard, no data validation is happening - wonder why???

So I told Yahoo, they have a spammer, someone saying the pages are encrypted when they are not, and offering a shady at best service. Yahoo's response? You guessed it. The site is in no way affiliated with Yahoo!.

So just so you don't think I am a crazy.

Here are these two whois info:
UnsubscribeNow.org
just-bargains.com
Here is the ip for just-bargains.com - 66.218.79.169
And for unsubscribenow.org - 66.218.79.173

And just so you can tell your mom you are smarter than any Yahoo employee, run a tracert for unsubscribenow.org or just-bargains.com and make your decision if these spammers are connected with yahoo. Yahoo seems to think they aren't.

So come on yahoo, if you hate spam so much, clean up your own house before you bother inventing some technology to stop spammers.

Next up - the amazingly tangled web of AOL-Timewarner.

Domain Registration Service as a spammer

Got spam this morning from a company with the domain name, cheeryholidays.com, the spam wanted me to got to t1.cheeryholidays.com (207.182.151.130). Checking the domain name in whois we see that they are protected by Domainprivacyservices.com - seemingly a domain proxy ownership site.

Well close, it seems there is one little twist. Domainprivacyservices.com's ip address is (207.182.151.2) notice something similar? Same C block. Even more fun, the spam was sent by 207.182.151.192.

So not only does domainprivacyservices.com offer proxy ownership, are we to assume they also offer spam hosting?  The ip is owner by Southern Network Computer Systems, Inc. - Future Vision Communication. I couldn't find any info on Southern Network Computer Systems, Inc., but fvcommunication.com seems to be Future Vision Communication. I downloaded their AUP (it was a pdf file??), they say they do not allow the sending of unsolicited mail.  Well this was, and it was not only for a site hosted by them, but also sent through their networks. Pretty clear violation.

But it seems with all the reports already about Future Vision, contacting them will be next to pointless, but I will. And I will also their upstream provider Cable & Wireless (cw.net). But if you trace much of your own spam, I am sure you have seen plenty of cw.net hosted spam.

Here is Southern Network Computing's Spamhaus listing.
Here is a spews entry for Future Vision

Look at all those complaints, clear issues, deceptive practices. Why is cw.net still supplying bandwidth to these people? If I owned stock, I would be terrified. There is eventually going to be a collaspe for these companies that base so much of their company on supplying bandwidth to spammers.  While CW may be large enough to handle it, what about their clients?  This will mirror the collapse of Cisco during the dot-bomb era.

Special thanks to Patrick for point out - C&W is leaving the US market as they had filed bankruptcy. Surprise, surprise.

The End To Spam?

This is probably the best news for the death of spam in a long time. Microsoft and the state of New York are not only going after a spammer, but they are going after all of those who profited from the spam.

In the affiliate world (people who make a small percentage from each sale by directing people to the sites), this has cause a big shakeup. The major networks CJ, Linkshare etc have all sent out to affiliates new email guidelines and updated terms dealing with email.

While this will not stop the real scummy spam, this will affect the annoying spam like the one in the above article which was for a legit merchant.

Link 1 - Link2