August 20th, 2008
SpamZa - opt in spamming service fighting to remain online
A recently launched unethical spam list building service called SpamZa, is fighting to remain online after providing highly
successful (87 spam emails in 8 minutes) into fulfilling its objective, namely, to sign up any email submitted to hundreds of newsletters anonymously.
What is SpamZa anyway? SpamZa is a “creative” spammer’s tactic for building spam lists containing legitimate emails, which will not only be spammed with the service owner earning revenue in the process, but will also get resold to other spammers. Despite that this is a spamming operation, their disclaimer is forwarding the responsibility to the end user helping them build the spam lists - “SpamZa never send spam or unsolicited e-mails. You are solely responsible for the e-mail you choose to enter. SpamZa takes no responsibility in what you choose to submit.”
From “Sign up any email without confirmation for free spam. SpamZa.com will sign up this email to hundreds of newsletters anonymously” to “SpamZa is currently down because some host has less balls than it said it did. We are currently actively looking for a new host. We WILL be back. We never give up.” Know a host that might be interested in hosting us? Drop us a line at admin@spamza.com. We will give a generous percentage of all advertising revenue. As an informative purpose only, our best day earnt us 35$ — and we are still very very small. Please contact us if you are ready to host SpamZa or if you have any question” the service is desperately trying to remain online.
Can they make it? Unless 1&1 Internet Inc. reacts to the fact that it’s hosting the service for the time being, they could remain online for a little longer.
SpamZa’s vision according to SpamZa itself is pretty self-descriptive on the real nature of the service :
“SpamZa.com is a website designed to promote newsletters and interesting content. WE DO NOT SEND SPAM.
SpamZa will subscribe the e-mail you submit to hundreds of popular and free newsletters. You can leave these newsletter at any time. Simply speaking, you put any e-mail, you click “Spam this email!” and we do the rest.
SpamZa was created with the idea that spam and newsletters were our friends, not our enemies. Think about it for a second: some people worked really really hard to write interesting newsletters and emails. The least we can do is read it! SpamZa will subscribe any email sent to hundreds and hundreds of newsletters. Furthermore, its algorithm always being under development, you can expect the e-mail owner to make a lot of friends from Nigeria who have a lot of money to give and he can expect to have your Bank of America/Citigroup/eBay/Paypal account suddenly locked with a poorly written email from LOLUGETSCAMMED@PHISINGROFLMAO.com. You know all the newsletters that say “we do not redistribute or resell your email” (but do anyway)? We do the opposite.
We get your email known, and pretty well known to as many newsletters are possible. Expect any email
entered in our form to receive 100-150 emails per day at the bare minimum, most being able to bypass most junk filters. To use our service, enter any email and click “Spam this email!” and get ready to get spammed. You may enter any email you want but please understand this is very, very mean to use. For maximal efficiency, enter the email every day and re-spam it, so even if the person unsubscribe, he’ll get in again the next day.
SPAMZA DOES NOT SENDS SPAM. SPAMZA TAKES NO RESPONSABILITY FOR THE E-MAIL YOU CHOOSE TO SUBMIT TO OUR ALGORITHM. SPAMZA WAS CREATED TO PROMOTE POPULAR NEWSLETTERS AND NOT FOR SPAM. SpamZa is perfectly legal and respect all anti-spam policies around.”
In reality, this “spam your enemies” model has proven highly successful during the years relying on nothing else but its social engineering appeal, with several other related services known to have been developed in the past, perhaps among the main reasons why these intermediaries aren’t yet going mainstream is because spammers, phishers are malware authors consolidated and are now exchanging more data and resources than never before, making the need for such services obsolete these days.
Dancho Danchev is an independent security consultant and cyber threats analyst, with extensive experience in open source intelligence gathering, malware and cybercrime incident response. He's been an active security blogger since 2007, and maintains a popular security blog. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 08/20/08
