A Weblog About Topics and Issues Discussed in the Book Spam Kings by Brian McWilliams

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June 16, 2005

Bulletproof spam domains from Australia

primus.jpg Levon Gillespie ... spam lawsuit defendant, spam hoster, SpamForum.biz operator, ROKSO denizen ... and ICANN accredited domain name registrar?

Well, not exactly. Seems that U.S.-based Gillespie has signed up as a reseller for PlanetDomain, a division of Autralia's Primus Telecom.

Gillespie recently introduced his latest "bulletproof" enterprise, cheapBPdomains.com, in an email to fellow spammers. He promised that "bulk email marketing domains" registered through his site "won't be pulled for your marketing efforts."

I wonder if he's offering a service-level agreement to back that promise. Maybe he's feeling confident because there's no mention of spam or unsolicited commercial email in Primus' re-seller agreement. Then again, there have been lots of complaints about his hosting company, cheapBPhosting.com, not being real bulletproof.

Guess that explains why Gillespie is using Primus to host his new domain registration site?

Anyway, moments after he announced the new business last week, the IP address for Gillespie's cheapBPdomains.com (210.50.5.8 ) was placed on the Spamhaus Block List (SBL).

The collateral damage? 192 sites share that same blacklisted IP, many of them owned by Primus, including PlanetDomain.com.

Posted by brian at June 16, 2005 11:21 PM

Comments

We had already killed this guys reseller account and we have been suspending any domains used for Spamming. It'd be nice if folks would take the time to let us know about these things rather than just blacklist our IP's and write articles about it.

If you find any domains registered under Primus Telecom/PlanetDomain email abuse@iprimus.com.au and I will remove the domain ASAP.

Cheers,

Rory M
iPrimus Network Abuse
abuse@iprimus.com.au

Posted by: Rory at September 2, 2005 3:26 AM

Rory,
Punkass meat puppet Rory.
You knew before you were listed.
You knew this guy was peddling kiddie porn on your service... How do I know you knew?
Cause I'm one of the people who you blew off when it was reported.
I've sent you notices for identity theft phishing, and you shrugged.
Shut your cheasy hole dude.
You aren't a victim here, you're part of the problem.
You didn't manage to shut this guy off till you got shut off. So stop pretending that you're just now finding out. "It'd be nice if folks would take the time.." Pffft...
Any idea how hard you have to work at getting put on sbl.spamhaus.org? Did Steve just not have a 2x4 big enough to wake you up?
Lyin sad waste of skin and breathing room.
Must take one heck of a man to sell pics of naked children huh Rory?
Does it make it more sanitary that you just turned your back rather than post the sites or send the spam yourself?
Punkass mouthpiece.

I got a spam from your network on freakin Christmas Day spamvertising a "warehouse of..." kiddie porn.
I got one last week for an identity theft scam.
In between I've logged and reported hundreds of drug spams, con-games, and anything bogus from watches to diplomas you can name.
You've known... you ignored... you took the money with one hand and made a Oscar winning performance out of being shocked, then you did nothing.

I've got little turds in my email box today... right now, which are from your network and I come in here and see you scootin out the door like it wasn't you.
shut your pewling bitch ass, up.

Posted by: NuclearOption at September 20, 2005 9:59 AM

Where do you get off flaming people who dedicate themselves to the task of fighting Spam. I've worked countless hours of unpaid overtime dealing with Spam complaints and developing scripts and apps to speed up the process.

And as far as kiddie porn goes, the few times that I've been notified of such sites, or users on the primus network I've immediately removed them and forwarded all the information onto the Federal Police National Online Child Sex Exploitation team.

In most cases where Spam domains are purchased Primus does not make a profit, in fact they generally make a loss, as more often than not chargeback's occur on the credit cards used, for which we pay a fee. The average monthly cost of Spammers to primus is around $2,000 per month.

I fail to understand why you would assume that we would harbour Spammers, there is no good reason why we would do this, it only results in considerable wasted time, money, and inconvenience for our legitimate users, who find themselves on blacklists for actions taken by other users.

Abuse desks cop so much flack from users who fail to understand just how hard they're working to try and fight Spam. We don't tend to respond to emails because there just simply isn't time to liaise with every jerk who thinks their Spam complaint is more important than the other thousand Spam complaints received that day. If you want to help the fight against Spam, try and make life a little easier for us hard working Abuse investigators. Stick to using automated reporting systems as much as possible, a Spam Cop report takes around 20 seconds to investigate using macro's, where as a complaint with a bloody essay on how much you hate spam at the beginning can take up to several minutes to investigate, which do you think is going to get the Spammer offline sooner?

Regards,

Rory
iPrimus Network Abuse
abuse@iprimus.com.au

Posted by: Rory at January 9, 2006 11:12 PM

Domain Registry of America is one of the worst scam artist. I have over 400 clients and they call me about receiving an invoice from this company most often, trying to lure them into unwittingly transfer their domain to this company. Do not register with Domain Registry of America, they are unethical!

Posted by: T at March 13, 2006 8:36 AM

 

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