[Resolved] New way of taking someone's business down :(

[netconceal]

Hi Everybody,

We need urgent help from someone who can assist or suggest anything in this rather difficult situation.

We have been affected by unfair competitor who used spam as their weapon. I'd suggest reading carefully, since any business owner can be affected in such way, seems like my enemies just introduced a brand new way of making business wars.

Our web site is www.netconceal.com, we are software/service vendor selling online. Few days ago we have received a whole bunch of complaints from many people who received spam e-mail from some scumers. Those guys attempted to compromise our business by offering CHILD PORN as a "free bonus" with our product purchase. E-mails were as follows:

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------

Like to watch child porno?

You need to hide your IP address!

by the soft for hiding your IP and get 100 links with the best CP sites

for free! http://www.netconceal.com/

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Needless to say, it looks rather stupid to send e-mails like this from a reputable company existing for more than a year already. Obviously, if someone had used link to our site in their spam, it doesn't mean we are promoting child porn. We all have children too and consider child porn horrible phenomena.

But many people started sending reports to FBI, police, our hosting, our domain registrant and others key point of our online presence. We just can't image how many people did that! Really good and proved way to seamlessly attack almost any honest business. Yes, it might seem our product is a good niche for such attack (we offer online identity protection), but this can be applied to almost anything, like follows:

"Like to watch child porn? Limited offer! Order 10 packs of tooth paste from www.toothpaste.com and receive 100 free child porn links!"

What will you do after receiving such e-mail? I guess some of you will definitely report this to authorities or at least to spamcop.

OK, that's just an introduction.

My primary question is: WHAT TO DO IN SUCH CASES? IS THERE ANY WAY OF SURVIVAL?

We had been banned already from our web hosting, received calls from customers and started loosing sales.

How to fight against such sh** makers? Is it so easy to break down business in such a stupid dirty way?

---------

Make love, not war.

With best regards,

NetConceal, Inc.

Online Identity Protection -www.netconceal.com

[Wazoo]

This has nothing to do with the use of the SpamCopDNSBL. Moving this to the Lounge area, where one would find a number of similar Topics/Discussions already existing. The fact that the software involved is configuring systems to use open-proxies around the world to pass traffic, get around being banned in your favorite Forum, etc., etc., etc. really doesn't get me all that enthused. Google has cached versions of most of the web-pages involved.

And having moved this to the Lounge .... I run smack into a duplicate posting of this thing ... Other Topic deleted, warning offered that this is not the way things get handled around here.

[petzl]

What will you do after receiving such e-mail? I guess some of you will definitely report this to authorities or at least to spamcop.

42275[/snapback]

SpamCop members would/could report your website It's up to you to contact SpamCop and your web-host to cry "Joe Job"

SpamCop will try to add the spam senders computer IP to it's SCBL

This SpamCop members list blocks spammers in seconds!

This is as spammers try send spam. Not after the spam is sent.

Making our SCBL the very best blocklist for accurately sorting spam to it's "bulk Folder" for further reporting

[btech]

Looks like you pissed someone off, OR you have a product that spammers and criminals might like to use.

Either way, if you're not sending the messages or affiliated with the origin, then you have nothing to worry about.

[Miss Betsy]

I don't know. It does seem as though he has something to worry about.

We had been banned already from our web hosting, received calls from customers and started loosing sales.

Since his product is one that those who would respond to porn spam might be interested in, he might have a hard time convincing his web host that he didn't send the spam while someone selling toothpaste probably could easily convince people that the spammer was using his website to confuse filters. The way the spam is worded it does sound as though he either did it or someone deliberately is attacking him rather than a random filter buster, though. If his customers are complaining, perhaps it is a disgruntled former employee. An ordinary spam run wouldn't go to his customers in a form that they would normally open and see the name of his website probably. Most spamcop reporters would never see the name of the website since they don't open spam.

The only thing I have ever seen about combatting Joe Jobs is to put a disclaimer on the web site. First he would have to convince his web host that he doesn't have a deal with a porn site, I guess. There is probably a lot more to the story than what he has posted. All we can do is guess at what happened.

Miss Betsy

[Wazoo]

As stated in the Topic starter, alluded to in my first reply by noting that "Google has archives of most pages ..." the web-site was in fact not available based on the ISP's actions. However, checking today, the web-site is back. I'm still not in awe of the sales pitch, turning the "how the Internet works" into the dire straights of "if someone learns your IP address, you die" type of explanation .... geeze ....

I don't recall seeing all the URL obfuscation going on, the use of some .biz thing to provide DNS for a .com is certainly unusual, but perhaps more of the marketing environment involved with such a product ..???? I'm going to tag this one as Resolved for now.