How to treat spammers: A simple case study

Today morning I received a spam which originated from plaxo servers. It was interesting. Someone named Mr. Richard Milford felt he had my contact information on file and requested me to update it!

the exerpt of the email:

Angsuman,

I'm updating my address book. Please take a moment to
update your latest contact information. Your information is stored
in my personal address book and will not be shared with anyone else.
Plaxo is free, if you'd like to g ive it a try.



Thanks,
Richard Milford

I never know anyone with that name. Then I looked at the information
he had about me - my name & email address only! Something you can
easily find by a crawler from my website.
And I have never
contacted a mortage company in my life, nor have voluntarily given my
information to any.

This was clearly a case of spam, a wilful disregard of
the laws and using my resources without my consent.

And he also gave me his contact information, see
below.
I felt this clearly required some action on my part,
more than just instructing spambayes to treat it as spam. Also
I am afraid if I do so, many genuine emails from plaxo may be
given similar treatment automatically.

So I wrote a polite email
to abuse@plaxo.com as show below:

Hi, 

The email was sent to me through plaxo.com system by one of your member.
I do not know him, never heard of him. Looking at his vCard I found
he sells mortgage. I have never contacted any mortgage agency
in my life, nor have given my info to any. This is clearly a spam and
in violation of our company policy and as I verified it is also in violation
of your policies. Please ensure that your system is not used to
send spams to taragana.com in future.

Thanks,AngsumanPS. I am including the full
email as well as the vCard of the abuser as attachment.PPS. I would appreciate if you
would let me know what action has been taken against
the member.

I immediately received an confirmation of
receipt email.

Thank you for taking the time to contact
the Abuse InvestigationsDepartment at Plaxo. We appreciate your help
in reporting potentialviolations of our Terms of Service. 

We take all reports
of abuse very seriously, and will respond back to you,if necessary.  If you would like to
check the status of an abuse report,simply respond back to this
message and someone will contact you shortly.

Thank you again.

Plaxo Abuse Investigationsabuse@plaxo.com

This was followed by a response from a plaxo official:

Angsuman,

Thank you for taking the time to contact Plaxo.  I am the Trust Officerhere at Plaxo and I am responsible for addressing Trust and Securityissues regarding the usage of Plaxo.

I'll take a look at the member's account and history, and if I find theuser to have violated our Privacy Policy, their service will be revokedand you should no longer receive further emails.

If you receiving any further spam messages, please feel free to reportthem to abuse@plaxo.com.

Thank you for reporting this abuse.

Stacy Martin

A very prompt & polite response, if I may say so. I was very much impressed.

This was followed by a short email which informed me everything I wanted to know, all done within 2-3 hours.

Angsuman,

You wanted to know what action was taken.  It wasn't much of aninvestigation.  The member has been disabled and will no longer haveaccess to our service under his currently registered email addresses.

Thank you,

Stacy Martin__________________________ Stacy Martin                 Plaxo Trust Officer      'Stay Connected'

I am very much impressed with the promptness of Plaxo in this regard and their swift response. In fact I started looking to get myself enrolled in plaxo, because I felt they are someone I can trust with my contact information.

You may be thinking what’s the big deal. He can surely open another email account with say hotmail and repeat the procedure! Sure he can but now he cannot use Plaxo to keep his contact list updated which are associated with his actual email address. Also you are even less likely to heed to a spam which comes from joesmith@hotmail.com (maybe an actual email, don’t try it guys). And its a bother. Also this posting is bound to be
read by few people who would give a second thought before approaching him for
his mortgage needs.

Now I have also written an email
to abuse@att.com. I will update this column with the results … keep reading.

Here’s the contact information the
spammer gave me in case you wanted to
do business with him <evil grin />.

Name: Richard Milford
Company: MortgageCap Financial
Phone: 212-631-4272
Email: milford@mortgagecapfinancial.com
Web: https://www.mortgagecapfinancial.com