Somehow my 11 year old son's email has been picked up by WhiteSmoke.com and their associated domains. I get a huge amount of spam from them - mostly without unsubscribe options, although I have tried that. Even tried their live chat but once they found I wasn't going to send money they disconnected. Seems to be owned by a "Liran Brener" who has articles in the big article directories. Seems he owns otshot.net too. http://whois.domaintools.com/whitesmoke.com http://whois.domaintools.com/otshot.net His linked in page http://il.linkedin.com/pub/liran-brenner/1/26/381 seems to portray WhiteSmoke as a big company with a CFO etc. If they are so big then you'd think they wouldn't need children on their mailing lists. Does anyone have any other info about this guy?
Don't have any info but it is instructive to give out "test" email addresses to new contacts. That way if they spam you just delete the account. I usually do this with new contacts so I wont have spam problems on my good accounts.
Nothing more annoying than getting a load of spam from a so-called legit company that won't let you opt out and it appears from what you say that WhiteSmoke.com is one of those companies. WhiteSmoke.com doesn't score very highly with WOT. Some reports say WhiteSmoke.com installs malicious software - always a concern and especially when the (spam) marketing is aimed at children. Many of the complaints on WOT also complain of spam related to WhiteSmoke.com.
I run my signup account through gmail and that gets most things and google "learns" too. I haven't done this with his because its all been runescape, club penguin type of sites. First time he's come unstuck. Simple change to send to gmail though... need to do it. I'm thoroughly fed up with them. I'll have to check that. One of my sites has been negatively targetted by a scammer that my site itself targets and therefore rates badly. I'll check the details
Funnily enough someone was asking the other day whether WhiteSmoke was any good for writers and the reply loud and clear was that it was "CRAP."
I wouldn't dream of doing such a thing. It's as Sarah says - the information is from a public thread.
No I was referring to WhiteSmoke using your son's e-mail without your consent . He is minor so he doesn't have legal decision power so AFAIK by the US law from 2008 you have the right to request the deletion of all persona data that they have regarding your son .
Well... I can tell you that this WhiteSmoke site is related to usagc.com, have you ever applied for a green card or someone you know from your PC or mail or anything? This guys are quite aggressive "marketing-speaking"
Moved my son's email so instead of forwarding to my personal email it passes through my gmail. Was disappointed they had changed their mail patterns and none had come through until I thought to check my spam folder... You buessed it - gmail had filtered them out for me. +1 to gmail