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FIB - Scams 101 - Ye Olde Archives
Posted By: The Roadie <wcarton@flash.net> In Response To: Yet another important question for the Roadie... (Valarri)
Wednesday, 22 June 2005, at 9:03 p.m.
> So how is it that you can just call Godaddy up and get as many specifics
> about another person's ordeals/account as you have? Are both of you not
> infinging upon the domain owners privacy? After all, as far as I can see
> in that thread, the OP never mentioned the URL in question. How is it htat
> they were so willing to share these details with you? Can jus tanyone do
> this or do you have some sort of "special" privilage? Are you
> with law enforcement maybe? Are you somehow involved in this case
> displayed n the warrior forum? Very confused here.
Some good questions. The domain in question (becomingalpha.com) was revealed in the headers of the post where the OP discussed his guess that the spam report was a misdiagnosed virus.
GoDaddy was being disparaged, and I have a habit of watching for mention of them in forums they might not be monitoring, in case they want to respond. Sometimes it's helped them defuse a situation that could easily have gotten out of hand.
I also believe I know the person who reported the spam to GoDaddy, but I haven't asked in that forum to see if I'm guessing right.
As the OP posted in a followup, he was not running confirmations on his address submission form. His autoresponder sent email to an address that could have been a typo, or put there on purpose by some idiot intending to harm him or annoy my fellow anti-spammer. When GoDaddy asked to see the simplest form of confirmation that the spam report was invalid - asking the OP if he had the IP address of the visitor to his web form that entered the address that got spammed, he didn't have it. The simplest form of defense against a spam complaint is to at least have the time stamp and IP of all submissions, and he didn't have it.
I just found the form in question. http://becomingalpha.com/newsletter.html (I just guessed the newsletter.html part). Anybody could go there, even now, and put in any address they felt like, even abuse@godaddy.com, and whammo-bammo, they would suddenly and without confirmation, end up on the newsletter list without their confirmed permission.
Running a form like this is like owning a backyard swimming pool without a safety fence. It's an attractive nuisance, trivially abusable as a harassment engine. It has to be run with a closed loop confirmation step, and the owner needs to keep and retain IP logs with date stamps of anybody submitting an address. The domain owner just isn't up to modern fish and game standards to be managing an address list in the year 2005. Sorry.
As he posted, he paid the $199 GoDaddy fine (he could have paid $50 and promised to move his registration elsewhere.) and he might be really annoyed at the person he thinks is a customer who reported him. That drama will just have to play out. I strongly suspect some bad guy put an anti-spammer's address in that form just to see what sparks would fly. Happens to me every month.
If GoDaddy was really stupid enough to be fooled by virus headers, and the Warrior Forum participants really wanted to believe the worst about them, I would not have gotten involved at all. But I'm personal friends with a few GoDaddy staff folks, so I thought I'd give them a heads up. The incident started out sounding like GoDaddy nuked the domain and suspended it already, and a quick look into whois showed that hadn't happened.
And at the end of the process, over at the Warrior Forum, the OP posted all the details anybody needs to make an informed decision about whether or not they feel safe being registered at GoDaddy, and the bogus virus-blame is gone.
I'm not any kind of LEO, but my research has been used in a few multi-million dollar lawsuits against spammers, and a lot of smaller ones. And I feed a few dozen spam reports a week to GoDaddy, so they tend to recognize my name. In the spirit of full disclosure, I have four domains registered and hosted there, but do not get any kind of discount, although they have given me a couple of golf shirts and a hat for some warnings I gave them about professional spammers setting up shop that could have gotten them blacklisted.
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