Wazeefa1 Spamming
I started receiving several copies of this spam email in the last couple of days. I’m not sure how many of you have had as well.
Now I have safely ignored it for the first time, but as it kept receiving more and more copies, I wanted to get to the bottom of it. Regardless of the supposedly opt-out message at the bottom, I want to know how did I get added in the first place to this acs-newsletter.com. I also got a similar email from acs-ads.com. Both of which have no launched site. How did they get my email then? Doing a whois on the site, you can tell they belong to a company called Absolute Career Solution.
And Googling for the Absolute Career Solution name, I came across one company in Kuwait with that slogan, namely Wazeefa1. But that might just be a coincidence. But once you whois Wazeefa1, things become so clear.
Clearly belonging to the same owner, Nedal, and under same company name, Absolute Career Solutions, a.k.a Absolute Spam Solutions. I did a search on my email, and no, I do not see any record of me registering with Wazeefa1. And if for the sake of argument I did register (to seek for jobs), why would I receive Sultan Center restaurant spam ads?
So do your self a favor, and stay away from this site. Nothing good can come from a business being run this way.
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Wazeefa1.com Job Site Review said,
January 14, 2010 @ 1:43 am
[...] The site has been noted for being affiliated with spamming user emails, and as a result we strongly advice against sharing any of your personal information with [...]
Katukoa said,
January 14, 2010 @ 11:33 am
I got this too. The thing is, I am very careful with where I post my email and will typically post a dummy email address for every web service requiring it, so I’m boggled as to how it ended up on their database. I also never visited this Wazeefa site!
So do you think this Nidhal is genuine about the removal note at the bottom of this ad? or will he push those who request removal to another premium-genuine-email service and then we’d end up getting more local spam?
Q8Ba7th said,
January 21, 2010 @ 4:35 pm
Katukoa: Sorry I’m late, and sorry this spam is spreading! My bet is, some other local service is selling our emails to 3rd party. We’ve seen 6alabat spamming us before. Luckily they stopped (and so did I ordering from them). So what could happen is, one of those sites you dealt with selling your email to 3rd party to spam you. That way they make money, and don’t get caught.
I wouldn’t trust the footer note for anything. Best thing is to mark them as SPAM, that way as many people do it, good email provider like Gmail will mark them as spam by default.
MBH said,
February 27, 2010 @ 12:58 pm
Semi-old article but worth commenting at.
I faced such abuse before, but not from this company specifically. As I often use a yahoo account or an alternate gmail account for shady websites, somehow people still get hold of my personal email which lead me to think that there are people harvesting email addresses from email forwards. You know, the type that families forward to each other & friends.
I remember 4-5 years back seeing a personal ad in Al-Waseet newspaper of someone offering to sell 10k+ emails for 85 KD.
I’ve read about some people who have their own domain names setting up email forwarders and using those forwarders to sign up for services to catch companies who sell their personal info. Once they’re caught pants down, the email owner simply deletes the forwarder.
Q8Ba7th said,
February 27, 2010 @ 1:04 pm
MBH: Yeah me 2! My friend got an ad for ad broadcasting to Kuwaiti emails. He called the number and they confirmed they have X number of valid Kuwaiti emails.
You know what’s funny? How some people get pissed off when I remove their email from the forwarders. They see it as taking their credit rather than protecting their privacy.
I am thinking of something for Kuwait Spammers. You know, some kind of list or something,
MBH said,
February 27, 2010 @ 1:53 pm
Honestly, I’d blame email providers for this. If they simply stopped adding the list of emails to forwarded emails, or at least provided the option to disable that behavior, we wouldn’t have such a mess.
You should see my 10 year-old hotmail account; I have spam from many Arabic groups. No matter how many times I unsubscribe, they add me again and many others add me too!
It’s like there’s a universal email list that’s being passed from one group to another to companies & so forth.
Even if you build a list of spammers, it wouldn’t stop them. They’d keep sending emails and they’d end up in your junk/spam box and they’d sell your email to yet another payer.
And it’s not just about Kuwaiti people. Some of the groups that forcefully add my email are from Saudi, Jordan and a few more countries.
Q8Ba7th said,
February 27, 2010 @ 2:14 pm
MBH: Simply, Arabs don’t understand what spam means. I was talking to my sister couple of days back, and she was arguing we shouldn’t make a big fuss about the SMS Spamming. Just delete it. Even when Wataniya sends 4 non-personal SMS in one hour!
MBH said,
February 27, 2010 @ 2:22 pm
It’s a shame we don’t have pro-privacy laws here, and even if we did, no one would have the guts to sue because it’s a sure loss to consumers due to bureaucracy.
Zain does the same thing. They spam you till you ask them to stop it, which they do after 3 days only to haunt you again in a few months.
Sometimes they choose to send messages at inconvenient times, like 1-4 AM. People are mostly asleep and I don’t silence my phone in case someone calls for an emergency and to use the alarm!
But I found out that people don’t appreciate how valuable privacy is until they lose it themselves, or theirs gets abused.
Back in the old days, before email verification, I used to do that to such spamming groups: I’d add the group’s email to offensive/malicious/spamming websites.
Nowadays, spam bots harvest websites for emails to spam them, apart from the usual brute-force method.
Hmmm, come to think of it, your idea might actually work: Listing spammer’s group email and more importantly, admins’ specific emails!
But as your sister said, just delete it. And in case of email, it makes less of a hassle since it no longer comes to your inbox; it hides in the junk/spam box…
Q8Ba7th said,
February 27, 2010 @ 2:32 pm
MBH: Least we can do is warn people to keep away from such sites I guess. Their SMS timing I guess is because it’s a large batch, or because they prefer low-peak periods.
Side note: Your alarm doesn’t work if phone is silent? With Nokia, even if phone is off it would ring.
MBH said,
February 27, 2010 @ 2:42 pm
The people you want to warn probably don’t read sophisticated English sites. Not even dumb ones (we could try hard to simplify but it still wouldn’t work). More over, people joining such groups don’t care about spam.
We’re a minority and no one cares about us D:
As for my alarm, my old Nokia Communicator “Smart” Phone wouldn’t sound the alarm if it was set on silent. Quite smart.
Q8Ba7th said,
February 27, 2010 @ 9:22 pm
MBH: Yeah but still, best we can do.
Nokia? I thought you’re Android
MBH said,
February 27, 2010 @ 10:23 pm
The Nokia was in the dark ages before the Android. It was the 9500.
MBH said,
May 4, 2010 @ 9:08 pm
Anonymous,
If your activation email wasn’t sent from this site, then this site has nothing to do with your problem.
Contact the support of the website you signed up with.