Someone Tried to Put One Over on VR? I don't think so...

Every week I use an online tool from Andiamo Systems that helps me track what people are saying about VerticalResponse online real-time (plug: my husband's rockin' technology, try it). I came across a cryptic post and asked Richard, our Manager of ISP Relations and Policy enforcement (long title, I know) to look into it.

I've asked him to post this, it's unreal. Richard, take it away...

"It’s 6:00 on a Tuesday evening, I’ve just arrived home, and what do I find in my inbox but a fairly cryptic email from Janine that says:

Does this make sense to you?

http://www.thealbanyproject.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=1184

I followed the link and found a blog article discussing some particularly annoying sounding political spam going out through a company called “linkedcampaign.com.”  Makes sense so far.  But then I read:

Linked Campaign is an email marketing service provided by a company called VerticalResponse Self Service Direct Marketing in San Francisco, with servers in North Carolina.

This, of course, did not make sense at all.  First, I know we don’t offer any sort of service called Linked Campaign.  Second, all our servers live here in San Francisco with us and don’t often make the journey to North Carolina (at least not while they’re on the clock).  Third, the type of mail described in the blog post would be very unlikely to make it out through our system.

Why would a blogger think we offered this “Linked Campaign” service?  I went to the linkedcampaign.com website in hopes of finding out.  And I certainly did find out:

Linkedcampaign.com was nothing more than a copy of our entire website as it appeared in March of this year! 

I immediately commented to the blog post (and emailed the Albany Project owner) to explain the situation.  They very quickly edited the article and posted two very detailed correction posts explaining that we were not involved with the problem email.  I couldn’t have dealt with nicer, more professional people than the folks at the Albany Project.

I then set out to track down the owner of Linked Campaign.  This was complicated by their use of Domains by Proxy to hide their WHOIS info (the owner of every website is required to have their contact info published to a WHOIS record, which can usually be looked up by anyone).  Domains by Proxy refused to release the information to me without a Court Order or a Subpoena.  I understood this was necessary to protect their customers, but that didn’t make it any less frustrating (or any less suspicious that the owner of a website that was a copy of our site was hiding their WHOIS info).

Luckily, the spam emails had gone out through a perfectly traceable IP Address that led back to Road Runner (an ISP).  I contacted Road Runner, discovered they were hosting the linkedcampaign.com website, explained the situation, and they took the website down.

I also discovered that one of the websites responsible for the spam emails had a very small print contact phone number at the bottom of the main page.  I contacted this number, and after being passed around a bit (and being given a different phone number) found the owner of that site, who put me in contact with the owner of Linkedcampaign.com.  The owner apologized, said he didn’t know the Linked Campaign domain was being used to mimic our website, and explained the numerous steps he’d take to ensure the problem never happens again.  And so far so good in that regard."

JP: So the bottom line is, keep a tab on what's going on about your company online, then make sure you act on it, bad things can happen to the best of companies. Good news for all of you? We spend a ton of time protecting our reputation so your email gets in the door!

 

Comments

[Janine Popick]

For Mary - can you be more specific about images posted on blog sites?

[Nick Ezzo]

I'm not sure if you had a web analytics package installed, but VisiStat (http://www.visistat.com) specializes in alerting you to things like content theft.

Just a thought.

[mary f walton]

What about images listed on blog sites?

[Carrie]

just in time for halloween - a very scary story (for business owners and more) I hope this isn't a trend!

[Amanda]

Doesn't really look like they are up to any good with the site they have live now either!