Image by Phạm Thanh Lộc - The Noun Project - The Golden Frog is the national animal of Panama - I found a black one to signify the operators based in Panama inside the dark web of spamming.
I received the following email from Keith Rainville.
Learn to build an email list of your best customers on LinkedIn or access our database of over 500 million businesses worldwide.
Then simply send the list with just an EmaiClik! [note the on-purpose spelling mistake to get through any spam filters!]
Build and send unlimited Cold Emails from the best all-in-one solution on the market.
One Monthly Charge for Unlimited Everything! All-in-one Solution!
What you get:
Build unlimited lists
Send unlimited lists
Sales sequence newsletter campaigns with unlimited email send
Linked auto-connect feature
Find emails from first name last name and company name
Find emails from domains
Chatbot solution to capture and convert visitors to leads
and much more...
Start your 7-day trial and get grandfathered in for just $99 per month.
Use Promo Code: WELCOME301 and save $30 on your first month for a limited time!
Cheers Keith Rainville
Founder/Developer
These are the header details:
I know his company is EMailClik and KJRDigitalMarketing, images below:
In the above header I spotted “X-Report-Abuse: <abuse@mailrush.io>”. I hadn't come across Mailrush.io before, so this was a new one. When I interrogated their website I saw claims on there that worried me quite a lot. One of those claims suggests that they can use LinkedIn's Sales Navigator to extract email addresses.
Clearly that's quite worrying and so I posted about this on LinkedIn and tagged the CEO Ryan Roslansky and LinkedIn Help, the post is below.
LinkedIn provided me with their standard response that confirms they ensure data integrity, but clearly this company is able to achieve something on their site.
Thanks for sharing this with us, Michael. LinkedIn is committed to keeping its members' data safe and secure and we take this commitment very seriously. If you’d like more information on how we protect member data, you can find that here: https://lnkd.in/gxfaA7R -AS
I have never heard of Keith or his company and don't want to be receiving his emails, so I reached out to Mailrush to report the abuse and requested, as I do every time now, to be added to a global erasure/suppression list. They kindly opened a ticket on their system to confirm that one of their users sent the "cold email" to me and that my email address has now been blocked permanently so no other user will be able to email me. Correspondence below. They failed to answer my follow-up question of course.
So I looked up Jurgen Moreno and found him on LinkedIn of course. He's not just a technical support person, he is in fact the founder of Mailrush.io and promotes his services very happily on LinkedIn via his personal profile and company page.
I wasn't really that happy with LinkedIn's response, so I opened a separate support ticket with them to highlight this further and at the time of writing, they have advised me that it has been passed to a different team within LinkedIn. Fingers crossed they will actually do something about this.
When I ran the email header through SpamCop.net, they identified via the IP address that the real offender is Cyber Cast International, S.A. in Panama and after processing it will have automatically emailed abuse@ccipanama.com. When I check ccipanama, I find that Mailrush.io is featured on their website front and centre, right in the middle of the page.
To me there must be some sort of linkage between Mailrush.io and Cyber Cast, I thought. Sure enough Jorge Moreno is the key principal owner of Cyber Cast, so sending an email to ccipanama isn't really going to work is it! And it's on his LinkedIn profile too!
I am in some way pleased that I managed to get my email blocked on their servers, however providing that is actually true? If the spammer and data scraper owns the whole infrastructure of their illegal spamming activities, it does make you wonder if we ever stand a chance to stop these chiefs stealing our data and selling it on. Probably unlikely and that’s why the whole internet is such an ugly place these days.
If you have any stories like these or other examples, share them on social and tag them with the hashtag #theuglyinternet. Maybe one day we can get Big Tech companies spend a few million dollars on stopping spam instead of paying their shareholders and flying into space.
Happy Spam Reporting!
ps. I know some of you maybe tempted by these cold email services and all I would say is, DON’T, it really is not worth it for your own reputation and business.
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