My guess is that first priciple is an online advertising group.
Most casinos have completely seperate media buy departments not connected to the aff program, although some are interlinked.
Media buyers contract online advertising groups to advertise the casino. To track performance, often the same type trackers as aff trackers are used.
These advertising groups are much like SEO places – buyer beware. Often the casinos are not aware of the techniques employed. Typically you just pay a fee and count the clicks.
As we all experience, Yahoo and Hotmail adresses and many other public email places are constantly indexed by spammers of all descriptions.
Typically the holiday months, November, December, and January too because people are paying for the expenses from xmas, are very slow and casinos need additional advertising. So you will see more action from these advertising groups.
Thankfully the effectiveness of spyware has decreased a lot, so we don’t see other people’s contextual ads plastered over our sites much anymore. (It still goes on though, see here http://www.benedelman.org/news/052107-1.html
This is considerably more worrysome than spam.
If you complain and the mail from a casino stops within a month or so, they did the right thing and cancelled the contract.
These mails are often generated all at once and put into queue, the server releases them at certain intervals. Typically the advertising group just lets them run out when a contract is cancelled and concentrates on current contracts.
Casinos are not going to get on the bad side of advertising groups. If the DOJ decides tomorrow that all aff sites should be blocked, they will need these groups. So there will never be a shame and blame here.
(Yes, it is possible to filter out all sites with casino etc in their name – the Phoenix airport does it already.)
So all you can do is ask the casino to please drop the campaign they purchased and wait for it to run out.
I don’t like it either, but that’s the way it is.
Except for numerous Playtechs selling their data when they left the US (and Blasters is the only one who didn’t do that but took the trouble to map us over to Golden), sales of databases are rare. They happen when a casino closes or when a rogue employee steals them.
I think what we are looking at here is a media buy that turned out spammy.
Now, when you are looking at a personal email sitting on your server with an unusual name, such as [email protected] or such, and you get mail there, you can conclude there is an actual problem.
Common names and public email services are totally inconclusive, they are harvested on a regular basis by all kinds of places.