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May 16, 2005
Acne spammers get AOL blacklisted
An operation set up to spam a cure for acne has landed America Online on the Spamhaus Block List (SBL).
An IP address belonging to AOL (172.149.244.185) was placed on the SBL over the weekend after it was discovered that the address had apparently been hijacked and was hosting coldbiz.com, a site run by a spamming operation called Idea Product.
Idea Product is currently running banner ads at the SpamForum.biz site recruiting spammers to send junk email touting Oratin, a dietary supplement containing glucomannan, an herbal compound also marketed as a laxative. A 30-day supply of Oratin sells for $49.95.
The ads direct visitors to a sign-up page at coldbiz.com, which claims Idea Product is "the official resellers of ORATIN." Affiliates are promised 50 to 65% commissions on any sales of Oratin they create.
It's not clear how the spammers hijacked AOL's IP, which is one of the ISP's dynamically assigned dial-up IP addresses.
Source code of the sign-up page showed it was actually hosted on the Yahoo Geocities service. (The site's image directory was still viewable here.)
The Oratin site claims Oratin Inc. is headquartered in New York. But the New York Secretary of State's site contains no listings for the company.
Oratin.com, which is hosted by theplanet.com, also landed on the SBL this weekend.
No answer this morning at Idea Product's tollfree phone number, which seems to be a mailbox at Ureach.com.
Posted by brian at May 16, 2005 10:57 AM
Comments
Hi,
Yes , it was a mistake on our part, one of our
advertising directors got a little nutty
and went and advertised our affiliate
managers program on the site.
We have told spamforum to remove all
affiliates already,
A mistake of ours, but we'll learn :)
btw we never sent out a single spam
or have yet sent out anything.
Thanks guys
Posted by: Ideaproduct at May 16, 2005 2:58 PM
lol levon, GIMME A MONTH OF BULLETPROOF HOSTING YOU SCAMMER
Posted by: Pavan at May 16, 2005 5:23 PM
What happened to Oratin.com? Will the site ever be back?
Posted by: Mark at May 19, 2005 10:28 PM
Was Oratin.com bogus?
Posted by: IR at May 23, 2005 4:51 PM
I don't know whether Oratin, the product, was snake oil or not. (You could do some searches on konjac, the asiatic plant that glucomannan is derived from.) But the web site oratin.com is currently unreachable, as is IdeaProduct.com, the web site of the company that was marketing oratin.
Posted by: Brian at May 24, 2005 9:44 AM
Oratin, the product is is genuine as I placed an order online and it came within 2 weeks. URGH! Will the site ever be back?
Posted by: Jonathan at May 27, 2005 11:41 PM
I received a package from Oratin also 3 weeks ago. Seemed genuine enough. Now cannot access the website.
Look at this on SBLs website..
http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/sbl.lasso?query=SBL27093
Is it time to block the credit card ?!
Posted by: d at June 1, 2005 3:38 PM
