Spam: N ENZO & CO, Part II

I’ve had a partial resolve to the spam I had yesterday from N.Enzo and Co. Basically, it’s stopped but I’m still not sure exactly who “N.Enzo and Co” are. A search on 192.com doesn’t show any ‘Enzo’ living in Colchester 🙁

I had a response (within 6 hours!) from the email I sent to MAILBOXES ETC feedback form which read:

Dear Richard,

Thanks for your email, if you would like to give me a call on 01206 368881 I would be most happy to discuss any questions you have

Regards

Steve Sleigh
Centre Owner

E-mail: info@mbecolchester.co.uk
Tel: 01206 368881
Fax: 01206 368882
www.mbecolchester.co.uk

I decided not to call him as I wanted everything in writing (I have got the facility to record telephone conversations – hell, if I’ve got anything in the vicinity that is set on record, it’s recorded anyway – but the UK legalities can be picky and I know I’m slightly out of date with them).

I responded thusly:

i Steve,

Basically over the last 24 hours, I’ve had nearly 600 spam
emails advertising the ‘UK HACKER CD’ that have been traced
by to a user of your mailbox service.

The Spam email takes the form of:
Return-Path [random letters]believablehcd@hotmail.com
From: UK HACKER CD [same random letters]believablehcd@hotmail.com
To: [random numbers+sometimes a few random letters]@mydomain.tld
Subject: HACKER CD – NOW £3.99

At the moment, the spammer appears to be using a dictionary
attack to spam my machine. Hotmail DO NOT have anything to
do with this attack as they spammer is using forged headers.

As you may be aware, the EU has just passed Directive 2002/58/EC
http://europa.eu.int/smartapi/cgi/sga_doc?smartapi!celexapi!prodCELEXnumdoc&lg=EN&numdoc=32002L0058&model=guichett
which makes it a requirement that advertising email be
sent only to those subscribers who have given their prior
consent. As you can probably understand, there has never
been (and probably never will be) any email address on the
mydomain.tld domain which match the addresses targeted by
the spammer.

I may also point out at this moment, that since I never
gave this user permission to access my server AND that
they are generating a mild Denial Of Service attack which
may end up costing me money (I have a bandwidth limit
on my server and several hundred emails at 29Kb each soon
start adding up). Therefore, under the UK’s Computer Misuse
Act http://www.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts1990/Ukpga_19900018_en_1.htm –
section 3, subsection 2 they are committing a legal offence.

I hope that you can understand the current situation I am
facing: somebody is seriously causing me time (and, by
looks of things, financial) suffering and they seem to have
no thought of stopping this abuse.

I have attached 3 spam emails (complete with headers) for
your attention. You will see at the bottom of each email
is a mailing address for ordering purposes which reads:
“N ENZO & CO”,
DEPT 207,
9 ST JOHNS ST,
COLCHESTER,
ESSEX CO2 7NN
which, I believe, belongs to your service.

Since I am considering the possibility of taking legal
action (to cover costs at a minimum, so far amounting to
2 hours of my time, bandwidth costs and storage costs),
I really need to know your clients name and address so
that court documents may be served upon them. Of course,
if you are unable to provide these, then I will have
to get them served upon Mailboxes Etc.

I’m sure Microsoft Inc (the owners of Hotmail) would
also be interested in your clients abuse of their trademarked
name, and the administrators of the third-party servers
that your client also abused to “bounce” his spam through
to try and hide his identity that much. If he had such
a ‘good product’ to sell, and it was legal to do so (I
have my doubts about the copyright situation of some of
the contents, plus I doubt he really can offer the
“McDonald’s Secret Sauce” recipe – a breach of the UK’s
Advertising Code along with another abuse of trademark).
I do wonder what all the major international corporations
would think if they were to find out their trademarks
were being abused in this way and you were the only
person they could contact regarding this?

Ideally, I would like the spam to stop THIS INSTANT
(although since starting to compose this reply to you
I have already received another 20 emails) and an
apology from the spammer, but I doubt this will be
anywhere near forthcoming.

I would be grateful if you could get back to me as
soon as possible (via email) so that this matter
can be sorted out.

Yours,

Basically stating the problem, the possible legal ratifications it could land MAILBOXES ETC in (note that I did NOT say I was in the process of starting legal action – threating legal action and not taking it is illegal in the UK, but to say you are considering the possibility isn’t), and then told him what I would like to happen.

To his credit, he did respond within 2 hours with the following:

Hi,
I am sorry that you are being spammed, I will speak with my mailbox holder and warn him that what he is doing is illegal (I guess he probably already know this anyway) and that his contract with us prohibits any illegal use, that is about all I can do I’m afraid. If he continues to carry on then his mailbox service will be terminated in accordance with his contract.

Best regards

Steve Sleigh

That was at 12:19 GMT, at 15:19 GMT I received the last spam email advertising ‘the UK HACKER CD’. I haven’t had any more since and it’s been around 12 hours, so hopefully Steve’s told his client to stop forthwith. It’s good that they’ve had a word with their customer, but ideally they should close his account with them straight away or else “N.Enzo” and MAILBOXES ETC are profiting from illegal actions (which, I believe, is an offence under UK law – but I’ll have to double check that).

By looks of things N.Enzo has been spamming for a couple of months (sometimes advertising it as the ‘Spy+Software+Wholesale CD (UK)’) , Oct 4-18 (Google USENET) Oct 11, Oct 25 (Google USENET) Nov 7 (Google USENET)
So 197 captured emails later (spam is normally automagically zapped, but if I see MailWasher zapping lots of ‘similar’ emails, I make exceptions for it so that I can actually retain copies for reference and complaints – hence it takes a lot of similar spam to hit me before I even notice!).

I’m still not quite sure if I’m going to follow this up (perhaps with the Advertising Standards Agency, a tip-off to McDonalds, maybe one to HotMail – I haven’t decided yet), but at least the spam (from this source) has finally stopped.