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Sounds nasty. If the spam would not have been Casino related it would not have been so obvious.
Ever since the rigged English Harbour game story, OddsOn (or now “Vegas Technologies”) have lost any credibility in my book anyways.That’s pretty powerful research pointing at them, but before I would say the research is conclusive, one would have to know more about the email account.
Such as, is it a webmaster@ “anything”? (info@, sales@, support@, tech@ etc…..)
Is the email account with a major or minor ISP?
Is the email account used as a parent email for a web hosting account?
Is it possible the administrator of the domain where the email account came from could be selling the accounts? (whether they say they are or not)
I am not saying you are wrong, but just cautioning not to jump to conclusions too soon….if you are correct then I totally agree this is wrong.
Rick
Universal4Firstly the email address receiving the spam is highly unlikely to be “guessable” by spam bots or dictionary attacks. It has multiple strings separated by a delimiter and such and is with a major major email provider (think hotmail, gmail, yahoo). We were suspicious before we did this so we purposefully made it obtuse.
I’ve done some more digging.
This “First Principle Group” is the bad apple here. No mention is made of them on GoldenCasino.com. But their privacy policy sounds deliberately vague to me:
Quote:http://www.goldencasino.com/privacy.phpSharing and Control Over Your Information
GoldenCasino.com does not and shall not sell your User Information to anyone. Our parent management company may share your information between other sites that it manages, but will never provide your User Information to a third party for sale or rental. Within our gaming software, the user may update their personal information.
No mention of who or what the “parent management company” is. I thought they belonged to something called Hambledon (?). Also, while precluding selling your info, they don’t say they won’t give it away for free (or is that just me being too suspicious?).
But I found this supposed anti-spam policy at goldencasino-online.com (which I presume is an affiliate account’s “shell” pointing people to goldencasino.com).
http://www.goldencasino-online.com/anti_spam_policy.html
Notice at the bottom that the First Principle Group asserts the copyright.
The spam I’ve seen come through is advertising many other casinos. eg
Code:First Principle Group obviously has access to every new account made at Golden Casino and is adding these addresses to their spam list as soon as people sign up.
Quote:Ever since the rigged English Harbour game story, OddsOn (or now “Vegas Technologies”) have lost any credibility in my book anyways.And the cheating Mulligan Poker software that very few people seem to have noticed.
Well, I’m sure Fortune is going to shut these accounts down pretty fast.
That’s ridiculous! I can’t believe there is not more outrage here??!
This is cross promotion at it’s worse since there is no way anyone could get credit for it! Plus the fact that it is real spam which is somehow started by opening a casino account. I would never promote them at this point and they will be removed from all my sites indefinitely.
well there wasn’t more outrage from me because I had personally filed them in the scum/scammer category already. I think other people should too. Fortune also needs to watch out that they don’t show up too often in Spam emails otherwise one may come to think that it’s a profitable venture for spammers to promote their properties.
@Goldfinger 147553 wrote:
Fortune also needs to watch out that they don’t show up too often in Spam emails otherwise one may come to think that it’s a profitable venture for spammers to promote their properties.
I agree 100% with this… A while back Platinum Play casino allowed a spammer to have access to one of my email addresses (that I only used for PP casino). I tried to talk to FA about it, but nothing really was done. I have no idea what happened. The spam emails DID stop, though, so they knew what the source was – just wasn’t willing to tell me.
:angry:
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.
Agreed but didn’t OP not point out that he was targeted on a very unusual inaccessible email address? Also shouldn’t the Casinos be more diligent when it comes to choosing those ad/seo agencies? Otherwise they can just always point their fingers and have get out of jail card handy when something fishy comes to light.
He said it was a public email provider – KW got spammed on a unique address.
This is one of those things one can go back and forth on forever I guess. He did say though
Firstly the email address receiving the spam is highly unlikely to be “guessable” by spam bots or dictionary attacks. It has multiple strings separated by a delimiter and such and is with a major major email provider (think hotmail, gmail, yahoo).
He also created it only a week ago ( did not post it anywhere in the wild I guess?!) and then he gets spammed. Sounds like an unlikely victim of an email crawler. I think there is more to it then just an unruly media agency.
@Goldfinger 147580 wrote:
This is one of those things one can go back and forth on forever I guess. [/quote]
Yeah, we can beat that horse to death.
Now KW’s complaint is non disputable since it was a proprietary address.
I can not believe this
another sick fish swimming in my pool
what on earth do they try to accomplish with this ?
Rick
Me again. While I’m not going to post the email address for obvious reasons, let me assure you that this is not a short guessable address like [email protected].
And even if it was, I find it would be too much of a coincidence to start getting spammed on it by this first principle group one day after the person in question created the address and only ever used it once at Golden Casino – it has never been posted publicly or used to register for any other website.
These guys are dirty, there is no question. Anyway the account has even more spam in it now. It has received 7 or 8 casino spams in the last 2 days, advertising:
http://www.scratch2cash.com/?AFI=67&PAR=xmas
http://www.Vegas-millions.com/main.html?lid=301772
http://www.englishharbour-online.com/main.html?lid=301772
http://www.goldencasino.com/?c=61871&s=fomh301772 (amazing huh? spamming for the casino the account already signed up to)Actually I had an idea. Create yourself a new email account. Make it tricky and long and full of numbers and weird characters.
Go to golden casino and sign up for a free play account using that email address (admittedly the account I know of was a real play account so ymmv).
Tell us here if you start getting spammed.
