Fed-up bloke takes email spammers to court – and wins piles of cash It's 9am. You open your email client and wade through the usual pile of spam that's dropped in overnight. It's boring and tiresome. But what if you could earn yourself a few hundred quid and kill the spam off as well? In a landmark court hearing last week, Sky News producer Roddy Mansfield won unspecified damages from retail …
Adverts.ie
Bewleys
Digitalspy.co.uk
Oracle (UK Office)
Tesco
TVTrade.ie
Well known Asian Companies that spam if you buy:
Dynamic Trading Co
NewFrog
Random USA or Asian or Russian spammers are one thing. Reputable UK / Ireland and other EU companies have no excuse for this.
Actually, EVERY "free" WiFi provider in London with a few exceptions like Starbucks too - with BT you actually don't get service until you agree they can abuse your details for spam, sorry, "marketing" which is MHO entirely in breach of the coercion part of Data Protection.
Come to think of it, I think I made screenshots. Time to get busy, methinks. Where is that template again?
"Actually, EVERY "free" WiFi provider in London with a few exceptions like Starbucks too - with BT you actually don't get service until you agree they can abuse your details for spam"
Agreed, and it's not only London, it works like this in Australia too.
When I tell people I carry my portable WiFi access point with me, they wonder why, when there's a plethora of "free" WiFi access points around the city. Except, like you said, few are really free.
All the UK companies that have harvested my email address from a website that I manage for an amateur unincorporated sports club owe me cash? The one's I'm thinking of have never had any dealings with either me personally, or the club, and I have never submitted my details to them? I realise that the worst culprits are the offshore SEO spammers, but there's a significant amount of UK spam as well.
Is there similar legislation against the crap I get from estate agents through my door every day?
No, but sending it back without a stamp tends to eventually drive the point home. I happy pay the price of an envelope for that. If they really piss you off, use a box and include a brick, but I'm not sure you can send that with "receiver pays" (which is what happens when you post back the leaflets without a stamp).
I'm getting to the point where I will intersperse any future presentation I will ever make for London Underground will be accompanied with some software that randomly throws in the comment that they should beware of card clash, and that we have at present a good service. And randomly stop for 4 minutes without telling them why. That sort of marketing is annoying too, and harder to fight.
#crapdayattheofficegrumble
a brick in a box would be entirely the wrong shape, for posting without paying the right postage..
Might I suggest that you take the offending pamphlet, and write a short not asking not to be mailed again.
Then, and I must stress that this is so that neither the pamphlet nor your note get damaged and thus become illegible during its passage through the postal system, and for no other reason.
Stick the letter and pamphlet between two offcuts of plywood. You should pick your pieces such that they will protect you note, but they should not be so thick that the final package will not fit through a letter box. Wrap or put into a sturdy envelope and address (remember to write clearly and use the postcode - you don't want the Royal Mail to send it to the wrong person).
Now take it to be posted. Since the package fits through a letter box, if the post office should happen to be closed then just put it into a pillar box. You did put a stamp on it didn't you? No? Oh dear. Well you can't interfere with the mail to retrieve it, so I guess the recipient will have pay (including underpayment surcharge) if they want to receive it........
[this is of course entirely hypothetical and should not be used as guidance for a course of action]
Me, I use this litle trick.
I have my own domain. I create emails for specific compagnies I actually want to give my email to. Then if I start getting spam on one, I know who done it.
Had a very red-faced bank representative trying to explain himself when he realised they'd leaked my email once. They didn't like me threatening to send the cops to investigate the data breach.
...for Expedia who spam me all the time despite having closed my account two years ago...I write and forward the spam, and they just ignore it... (I left because Expedia 'fix' their hotel rates as reported on the Reg)...
Same goes for the affiliated partners of RyanAir. Oh boy do I regret ordering from their in-air catalogue. Years later I'm still getting spammed and there's no unsubscribe option!
I feel we need a global do-not-email system for companies who continue to spam!
Are the most legit companies that emailbomb me a quite unreasonable amount (several times a week) but would probably stop if I asked them.
Maybe I should try the unconsented email marketing line of attack on Santander after they leaked my email address to real spammers (money mules, 'pfizer' spam etc). It sounds like it could be more effective than pursuing the ICO over the leak.
I'm waiting on feedback from a company that organises security shows. Of all the setups that should protect data, this is IMHO one of the more dodgy ones so I'm waiting with interest what comes back. I caught them when filling in the form already (which is why they got a temp address) - the opt-out was genuinely in 8 point or less and dark grey, and I had to grab a magnifier to read it (I carry a credit card sized freshnell lens so it actually was of use for once). The fun part was that I DID opt out, yet still received email.
I suspect receiving my response must have worried them. They'll worry more when they discover I'm following it up - generally they hope that by staying quiet and unsubscribing you you'll go away. No such luck with this one.
OK, I probably did consent to these, but Al Libris (second hand books) and Manning Publications (tech books) take the follow up to an order stuff to ridiculous lengths.
Books are subject specific. Just because I bought the second volume of a series of science fiction novels by Doris Lessing does not mean that I want to have almost daily emails about completely random volumes. Manning are just as bad; buying a short tutorial book on R - mainly direct interactive commands typed in a shell - does not mean that I want to buy books on obscure topics to do with proper programming.
Don't these people think about databases or even tags attached to the emails?
I'm from the DMA and just wanted to clarify a few points in response to this story.
1. The blogs on the EMC blog represents the views of the authors, not those of the DMA or the Email Marketing Council.
2. The practice of using pre-ticked opt-in boxes is clearly dealt with by ICO guidance, so marketers should abide by that. I noticed that to register to post comments on the Register for this story I encountered pre-ticked opt-in boxes to receive emails about events, whitepapers and surveys.
3. The DMA's website is not down because of a DDoS. The DMA's web host's servers crashed yesterday morning and the website has been offline since then. Nearly 36 hours on and we're still waiting for the web host to fix the problem.
I appreciate that T Garrick was never likely to be the most popular contributor from the moment he/she opened his post with "I'm from the DMA ".
Like many people, I detest most direct marketing with a passion. However, I'm still at a loss to see which of the 3 points warrants the downvote.
"Like many people, I detest most direct marketing with a passion. However, I'm still at a loss to see which of the 3 points warrants the downvote."
Presumably having had the opportunity of a decent, albeit state funded education; but still starting your post by showing that you've effectively wasted that opportunity and ended up (by choice, presumably) in a marketing related job warrants the downvote.
@ T Garrick
"1. The blogs on the EMC blog represents the views of the authors, not those of the DMA or the Email Marketing Council."
Don't buy that it, sorry. Its like turning a blind eye to political lobby groups and going 'oh, but that's not us'....Someone from your industry is labelling someone who values their privacy as a "Data Directive litigation troll"... That only fuels absolute hatred of your business. At the very least make an effort to explain who the DMC is, and who funds them!
2. The practice of using pre-ticked opt-in boxes is clearly dealt with by ICO guidance, so marketers should abide by that."
Should is the crucial word here! The problem is that its all too easy to be unscrupulous when there's no real penalty for abusing it!
It won't do much good for spam you're already receiving, but any future sources of spam will be easy to identify the source of which & deal with appropriately.
When a site demands your email address, go ahead & give it to them, but alter it so as to indicate where it was used. For example, Gmail allows the use of $YourRealEmailUserName "+$StringOfOtherCharactersWithNoSpaces" at Gmail.com... So if your address is normally JohnSmith (at) Gmail.com, modifying it to JohnSmith+AmazonDotCom (at) Gmail.com will still deliver the email to you, but is immediately identifiable as to where you gave it (Amazon.com).
From that point on, any time you get email to JohnSmith+AmazonDotCom, you know Amazon is the one from where the email address was used. If you tell Amazon to stop contacting you & you continue to get email from them, you *know* it's from them & can take appropriate action. Be it a simple auto-bounce-and-delete email rule to shunt it to various Abuse(at) email accounts, the company's CEO's personal contact address, or your Lawyer.
The best part is, if you start getting spam to that address and it's not directly from the place where you used it, for example getting emails from a Dating Site when the address was used at a Home Improvement site, you know *exactly* whom sold your address. Want to sue that company? You have proof they're the source. Want to never get ANY email from that specific email address? Add "JohnSmith+AmazonDotCom" to an auto-perma-delete Rule & watch your inbox drop to more reasonable levels.
Most email hosting services such as Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and the like allow such alteration of the email address as an Alias. It may be in the form of $String.$YourRealStuff, or $YourRealStuff.$String, or even something else, so it's in your own best interest to find out. Start using those alias' in your daily use of the web. If the site where you're registering doesn't accept the alias, then that's a big Red Flag Warning that they probably won't honour any opt out settings either, so it's in your own best interest to not give them your real data in the first place. That's when you either give them fake address info ("YouSuck(at)$TheirOwnDomain") or use a temporary email service.
The end result is a constant record of where you've used your email address, indicated by the $String data (like "AmazonDotCom"), and the ability to filter, redirect, or delete entirely anything to that specific $String. If $Company wants my address, they get $MyRealStuff+$Company (at) Gmail and I don't worry about if they spam the hell out of me or not. If they try, I set my client to auto-permanently-delete that $String, and *POOF*, no more spam from that particular source. Which also has the added benefit of letting me know never to do business with that company again.
No matter what I try It won't stop. Now they are sending it addressed to the previous occupier.
Can't they understand that I will NEVER EVER buy anything from VM. After all their bombardment has been going on for 10 years and still I haven't taken the bait. Perhaps they are trying to grind down my resistence after all, I'm the only refusenik on my part of my street.
Anon coz I don't want to tempt the receipt of more shite from them.
Our home address and landline phone number have been publicly available for years. Harvesting mobile numbers and email addresses from websites to increase this "stalking database", is child's play.
Try searching for your house on the internet. If you own it you will likely find your name, landline telephone number and a number of websites promising "more detailed information" (eek).
We live in a spammer's paradise.
It's not just Google we need to fear.
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