I was surprised and delighted to receive a phone call from the owner of the former "MLD Marketing" and "Data Inc" companies. He apologised for the spam sent, and is in the process of setting up a legitimate, opt-in email marketing and competition business.
This is wonderful news, and I'm glad he has listened to the complaints he received. He has promised to send me more details, so I will update this post once they arrive.
Hello All. It is good to see that one spammer has seen the error of his ways. Alas, many other self-satisfied know-it-all types still see fit to openly sell address lists. Most of them use gmail or other web-accounts (Duh! First warning to any company thinking they are legitimate). Another trick they have in common is to make use of an existing IT company's name by adding a letter or two to the title. The latest bunch have hijacked the name of Datacorp (A company that is now tired of dealing with angry phone calls) and turned it into Datacorpsa at gmail.com. The chap at "datacorpsa" calls himself James (And speaks with a slice it as you can Afrikaans accent) and insists he is a victim of the infamous Mr Triblehorn - which is yet another common thread among these guys who peddle our data. They also all tend to say "So why get worked up about it? It's no big deal..." They are very cagey about complying with section 45 requests as well and tend to try and duck and dive when pushed to make disclosure of their source. Did they all study at the same school or what? Anyway, there is a group of folk who have laid criminal charges against these guys in terms of various data nd communications laws as well as the companies act. None of them identify their legal trading staus, their physical addresses or any of the other stuff you are supposed to list on invoices for their ill-gotten lists. Watch this space for a report back on this as we hope to take out at least 7 of these list vendors who have - thus far - managed to get away with your data and the keys to your bandwidth. Enough! BTW- perhaps some of our pressure resulted in young Jeremy turning legitimate...he does not know how close he was to getting a visit from guys from various departments with a long list of questions about revenue, personal tax and other minor matters...
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