ABOUT THAT SPAM: IT'S NOT FROM US!
We've become aware that a group of spammers are sending out a variety of e-mail messages with forged headers, making it appear that the e-mail comes from this law firm. It does not. We don't send out advertising of any kind, to anyone, about anything, ever. The only e-mail we send is personal communication to existing clients.
Lately we've seen messages including an apparent attempt to pump and dump the stock of a China-based shell corporation (we sent that one to the SEC), a phishing expedition in the guise of a mortgage application, and another relating to herbal products with purported physiological benefits.
So - what about the message you got? It may seem obvious, but you shouldn't respond, to us or anyone else, if you received a spam message with a subject line about "We Owe You Some Money" or "Xanax, Get it Here" with a message body like this:
Xanax and other drugs with wholesale prices. You wont find better prices anywhere!
or:
Hello, As a valued customer, we provide you with occassional information and updates. Our records indicate that you may be in need of a refill.
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The links in the messages takes you to websites set up by a group of people apparently engaged in phishing, a preliminary step in identity theft. They've been working primarily through two domain registrars: one called joker.com, which has been largely unresponsive to our demands that they cancel the registrations the spammers use to harvest the information they use for identity theft.
One primary resource for those interested in battling the spammers is Internic. http://wdprs.internic.net/ is a place you can report these attempts, since invariably the spammers use fake IDs and bad e-mail addresses in registering their spam sites.
We've also tried to get joker.com and its parent, the Swiss company EIS AG, to take action. Joker is the registrar of choice for one of the most virulent spammers, and is apparently taking thousands of dollars monthly in registration fees from the spammers, enough to convince the higher ups their to protect the income stream, at the expense of everyone else. You can write to them too:
Contact Joker.com's domain registration department:
udrp@enom.com
EIS AG d/b/a joker.com
SPAM / UCE Department
Po Box 458
CH-6300 Zug
Switzerland
Since we started battling them, the spammers have spread their website among other registrars. When we have time, we try to deal with them, too. In the meantime, when we learn of a new spammer scheme using forged header spam bearing the name of one of our domains, we redirect as much of the spam as we can right back to the spammers through their administrative mailboxes.
We're sorry we can't do more about it. It's annoying to us, too!