jspira

By continuing to post and not canceling your membership after any privacy policy changes were enacted, it's likely you gave your consent.

I got the unsolicited commercial e-mail message as well, by the way. The "please respond to" field clearly said "Internet Brands" in it so there was really no mystery.

Aviatrix

And how would I have been notified of such changes? I don't recall receiving any such notification.

Here in the UK we have a principle of "informed consent" - companies are not allowed to send marketing emails unless the recipient has given their express permission. I appreciate that you don't (yet?) have such a principle in the US, but that doesn't make it right to spam people. And this IS spamming.

Why has there been no word from IB?

IBobi

Hello all,

We know that some members have inquired about an email they received from Nolo.com over the weekend and we wanted to let you know that this email was sent inadvertently. This was an isolated incident and our member list wasn't sold and is secure.

Thank you,

Paul

Aviatrix

I've just had a phishing email at my dedicated Flyertalk address.

There may or course be no connection whatsoever with the spam from Nolo, but the timing does seem rather odd.

JDiver

OTOH, I haven't.

Doesn't necessarily mean much.

But some members use Yahoo! or other providers that are notoriously targeted for phishing and other schemes, regardless of what the purpose is of using the provider.

Aviatrix

I don't use Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, or any of the others. I have several domain names of my own, and addresses @my own domains are the only ones I use. I have used two different addresses for Flyertalk over the years (both with "flyertalk" before the @), and both of them have started receiving spam and phishing emails.

Aviatrix

After a break of several weeks I have just received more spam at my dedicated Flyertalk address. The message itself is in Spanish, advertising LAN Chile, the "this is not spam" disclaimers are all in English, and the actual sender of the spam appears to be an outfit called weboutdoor.net, based in (goes away to check Whois).... PORTUGAL. Good - in the EU, I can do something about it!!!

IB, what have you got to say for yourselves?

Aviatrix

Spam is now coming in thick and fast at my dedicated Flyertalk email address... and some of it appears to originate from the UK. I've had a special Mother's Day offer - and as far as I know the UK is the only country that celebrates Mother's Day in March rather than May. (And the pricing is in pounds)

Does anyone other than IB staff have access to Flyertalk member records?

Would it be possible for a rogue moderator to harvest addresses from Flyertalk?

Aviatrix

I believe the "Report spam here" thread is for spam posted to the forum, so I'll post here again...

After a break of six months I have today received more spam at my dedicated flyertalk-at-own-domain address. It came from Portugal again, different domain name this time - net-communicate.com. And they're threatening to spam me on a daily basis!

I suspect there is probably a connection with the previous Portuguese spammer.

I'd still like to know how they (and the other spammers) got hold of my Flyertalk address.

Would anyone from IB care to comment?

IBobi

It would be impossible to know. I recommend putting emails from that address on your blacklist/marked as spam so they don't show up.

Aviatrix

That would deprive me of the pleasure of forwarding them to the Spamcop reporting service... and in any case the email addresses seem to change all the time.

(I don't report spam sent via botnets because that would be pointless. I do report spam sent by rogue marketers using their own or their suppliers' servers, because being cut off will hurt them!)

I would still like to know how my address got to these people. It can only be FT itself, or, possibly, a rogue moderator.

JDiver

FlyerTalk would hardly be a sole source of your troubles if your IP was targeted by a hacker or spammer using code to create an email handle generator.

At one time, we had some reports of members receiving emails from Internet a Brands businesses (Nolo Press in those instances, iirc). Portugal? Not anything IB there to the best of my knowledge. See http://www.internetbrands.com/our-brands/

There are other ways your email could have been harvested, and the idea of a rogue moderator would seem rather without reason. Such a putative "rogue moderator" would presumably harvest thousands or multiples of thousands of e-mails if it were for remunerative purposes; target certain members, moderators and administrators if the reason was retributive; would likely be behaving in other ways that would bring attention to themselves by admin or at least senior moderators. Not impossible, as little is, but truly a minuscule chance it is FT Moderator related.

Aviatrix

A hacker/spammer would hardly create an address of flyertalk@owndomain. And someone who harvested user names from my provider's system (i.e., by hacking into their system) would be spamming other addresses of mine, not just the one. I have loads of email addresses at my personal domain.

nolo.com is registered to IB according to the Whois, and they actually admitted (in this very thread) that they were behind those emails and that they were sent by mistake. However, I can't see any connection between nolo.com and Portugal.

I don't know what sort of access moderators have to members' email addresses - i.e., whether they can see them all, or just those of people who have written to them. Email address harvesting happens in all sorts of ways, and I have come across cases of very small-scale harvesting over the years... like people harvesting addresses from "round robin" emails where the sender was foolish enough to put all recipients' addresses in the "to" or "cc" field rather than using bcc. So - I would not exclude the possibility of some moderator having engaged in small-scale address harvesting by collecting addresses of people who have written to him/her.

As no one else has complained about spam from this Portuguese outfit so far I think that a rogue moderator engaged in small-scale harvesting is, possibly, the most likely explanation.

BTW, I had more spam from the same source today. It came from a totally different address from the previous one, but both domains (mail-communicate.com and mixlondon.net) are registered to the same person, Antonio Manuel Pereira of NBDS International SA.

JDiver

Of course, you never said it was your own domain until now. There are still other explanations.

As to the putative cause of the harvest, you and I will continue disagreeing strongly.

Aviatrix

Yes I did. See #21