Ask Slashdot: What To Do With Spammers You Know?

courteaudotbiz writes "For years, a business named Compu-Finder has been sending spam all around the province of Quebec, Canada. In their emails, there is a phone number where we can reach them, and an unsubscribe link that you can click and seems to work, but even after asking them on the phone, by email or with their unsubscribe link, to unsubscribe me, I still receive 10 — 15 spams a week coming from this company. Many bloggers, journalists and radio chroniclers talked about them, but they seem to be untouchable. Still, it is easy to find the names, addresses and phone numbers of the shareholders and administrators of the company. How can we, collectively, take action to make them understand that we do not like their mass mailing practice?"

Arson is your friend.

[Surt]

Really, it's the only way to get through to some people.

First Hand Experience...

[what2123]

I can speak on this company from a first hand account. I work for an ESP, I actually manage all our mail servers and work closely with ISPs and mail vendors to help out GOOD CLIENTS. I say this because Compu-Finder (although they have an official name that is different) was a client of ours. They were a BAD-CLIENT. We have many tools that are in place to help our clients ensure that best practices are followed as well as easily available to contacts of the client, e.g opt-outs and suppressing those contacts from future emails. Compu-Finder did everything they could to get around built in mechanisms to keep "contacts" subscribed. Well Finally after battling with them on changing their practices we finally fired them. They are the kind of company that makes me cringe because I know there are real, legitimate, marketers out there that do use email to engage clients and keep them up-to-date but they are the ones that make it bad for any sender.

Re:Getting your point across

[damn_registrars]

How can we, collectively, take action to make them understand that we do not like their mass mailing practice?

Are you under the impression that spam continues because people think we like it? That if they only understood how much we don't like it, they would stop?

I just hope that doesn't mean you are one of the mindless masses who believes that spam is sent out purely to make people angry or waste their time. People of even moderate intellect realize that spam is all about money, and the only way to stop the spam is to stop the flow of money to the spammers - or at least make it more difficult for them to get so much money so easily.

Re:As a start...

[i.r.id10t]

Or better, pull a Ralsky on 'em... http://slashdot.org/story/02/12/06/1554227/howto-annoy-a-spammer [slashdot.org]

File a lawsuit! Or many!

[www.sorehands.com]

There are some people or companies that will clean up their act when they have been sued. Sometimes it takes more.

Within a week after I had been contacted by one drug spammer that I sued, my spam load went down by 50%.

Another Spammer I sued, put in place a strong anti-spam policy and apparently quite effective.

When I went after Avtech Direct (Arlene Sediqzad and Gary Hunziker ) for spamming, I also helped arrange 21 lawsuits against them. After this was over, Sediqzad told me she wish she never heard of e-mail, and had not heard of it until Gary Hunziker got her into using it. Another spammer, Robert Smoley [sun-sentinel.com], stopped, only because he was charged, pled guilty, and sentenced to 40 months. They also seized over $40M of money and property from him. I think that is one of my most productive 45 minute phone calls with an IRS agent ever.

But this company you talk to is like Smoley, or Ralsky who needs to be sued multiple times or imprisoned for a while before they stop spamming.