Blog for hpHosts, and whatever else I feel like writing about ....

Thursday 9 July 2009

Low Cost Server Hosting - spamming a forum near you!

Quite where these people get the idea that spamming is a good way to promote an alledged legit company, is beyond me. The latest in the long line of "Yeppers, it'll work - no-one will notice!" is Low Cost Server Hosting (lowcostserverhosting.com - 69.43.132.234), run by Willaim Dale, Utiliware Corporation, apparently BBB Accredited (not for long huh?).

I did phone Mr Dale when I noticed the spam, as I was curious as to what his excuse would be - given there was no affiliate ID, ruling out the possibility of it's being an affiliate gone rogue. Mr Dale however, claimed he had no idea what I was talking about and infact, at first thought I was referring to e-mail spam.

A little research however, shows his site was not just spammed to the Spyware Warrior forums, but infact, was spammed to a whole slew of them, including;

http://forums.spoono.com/search.php?search_author=keatealphonse
http://mmorpgmaker.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=9051
http://www.adminschoice.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=390
http://stegmann.dk/mikkel/porta/forum/search.php?search_author=keatealphonse

... and quite a few others.

Our dear spammer even went so far as to spam another hosting company - woops? The admin for supanethosting.biz has removed the spam, but you can see a screenshot of it, courtesy of Google's cache;



Looking further shows Mr Dale also owns another domain, labortimetracker.com (69.43.132.210), which not surprisingly, was also spammed to quite a few forums, including;

http://forums.liverpoolecho.co.uk/search.php?search_author=florachristi
http://forum.siteground.com/archive/index.php/t-8592.html
http://forums.contracostatimes.com/topic/what-will-you-ask-santa-for-christmas#comment-190377
http://x220.win2ktest.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=27239

... and of course, a whole bunch of others.



The fact on both occasions, no affiliate ID or affiliate URL was involved, implicates the company itself as the perpetrator of the spam, which brings me nicely to my first lesson for Mr Dale in how to run a legit company.

Lesson #1: DON'T SPAM!

... and definately do not spam security forums. That's just likely to get you blacklisted, and little blog posts like this thrown up.

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