Spam Email Federal Prosecution – What You Can Do to Stop Spam – Uber Driver Arrested on Burglary Charges
Did Google’s new AI backfire on a stressful situation? This could not be far from Stephen Hawking’s, the famed physicist, warning “the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity”.
You might not know, that with AI now getting ready for the future, you could also be monitored in your office the moment you leave your desk.
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Related articles:
Google’s new AI has learned to become ‘highly aggressive’ in stressful situations
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http://craigpeterson.com/news/new-office-sensors-know-when-you-leave-your-desk/11784
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Transcript
TTWCP-DAILY-39_2017-02-22_Spam-Email-Federal-Prosecution
Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.
Airing date: 02/22/2017
Spam Email Federal Prosecution – What You Can Do to Stop Spam – Uber Driver Arrested on Burglary Charges
Craig Peterson: Hi. Craig Peterson here with another daily. Today we are going to be doing a little bit of a TechSanity check on two things. First of all, do you send out spam? Does your mail server send out things that maybe you’re not even aware of? We’re gonna talk about a man who’s charged with a federal crime for sending spam. Also if you use Uber, wow. An arrest just happened. We’re gonna talk about how it could affect you because, you know, Uber drivers aren’t all necessarily the best characters out there.
(TTWCP EARWORM)
Hey, that’s me of course. That refers to my weekend radio show heard on terrestrial radio as well as iHeart. The Clear Channel Radio app. It used to be called Clear Channel. Now, of course, it’s iHeartMedia. Ok. Let’s get right into it here. I have used Uber. You may have as well. Lyft, of course, L-Y-F-T, the big Uber competition out there. Well an Uber driver has been arrested. And here’s what he was doing. He would take people to the airport. Guess what he knew that they were at the airport, right? And he’d have a little discussion with them, you know, a little banter back and forth. Well, what are you doing? Always ain’t that neat? Yeah, yeah. A whole lot of fun. Well, Saddam A. Awadallah of Frankford, has gone ahead and used that trick himself. Now that’s a little bit of a problem at least as far as I’m concerned because he has been burglaring people. Charged with three counts of second-degree burglary. Possession of burglary tools. And theft from a victim older than 62. 11 counts of theft and criminal mischief. That was filed in Sussex County Court. They went ahead and issued a $31,000 bond order. They’re still investigating these burglaries. But if you’ve been a victim or you think you might have been a victim of someone like this. I’m sure he is not the only one. Saddam is not going to be alone in this. Make sure you contact the police coz this is a real problem. And it goes back to tracking right? We’re being tracked by all kinds of software nowadays. It’s in our phones. It’s in our Uber drivers, our Lyft drivers. Of course taxi drivers have long had access to that information as well. So do be careful as you are out traveling about. Particularly, you know, when summer comes up.
Well we also have to talk a little bit about spam. This is something that has been a problem, and more and more of a problem all the time. It’s just crazy. Spam, it started I remember when it first started. In fact people would be sending out this little diatribe from Monty Python about spam, spam and eggs, spam and ham, spam, spam, spam. And this whole diatribe was sent out because someone did something that they thought was against the rules. Unwritten rules of the internet. We used to call it netiquette or net etiquette. And people knew that you don’t try and use some of the Usenet newsgroups or email to try and sell something because that’s not what the internet’s for. The internet’s for the free exchange of ideas not for brash commercialism. Of course today we’re at the opposite end of that Spectrum. How long ago was that? It was back in the eighties and boy. I remember I got a spam message once. Someone thought I was I was saying something a little inappropriate when I didn’t think I was but, you know, whatever.
So today we have people all over the world who are sending tons of email and it is getting very, very annoying. Now we’ve installed some software for ourselves and for our clients that’s been amazing. I don’t get any spam email anymore. It’s absolutely amazing that I get all of the email then I’m supposed to get it. It really is amazing. So I get, you know, the order of 3 to 5,000 emails a day. Yes, a day. And you know I’ve had the same email address since ’91. So that’s probably part of it. But I, you know, popular guy and much of that, almost all of it is spam. About 90%, maybe more. And that’s bad. And then that is very annoying to me. So we went ahead and looked out there to try and find products. We used a whole bunch of stuff. SpamAssassin, which is an open-source product was really good for quite a while. I use SpamAssassin for my clients and then of course the bad guy started taking their emails. Running them through SpamAssassin to see if maybe they could get around SpamAssassin’s tags. It said that it was spam. And yes indeed of course they were able to get around these SpamAssassin tags. And so that got annoying. And we got to the point recently where we just couldn’t stand it anymore. Everyone was wasting time. So we started a real good hard look again. And we found a number of filters that were doing different things. We found a DNS filter that seemed to work okay. We found guys that were using SpamAssassin. Well we already knew SpamAssassin. We’ve been tuning it for years. I’ve been using it for years. And it just wasn’t cutting it anymore. And we’re the number 1, you know, my company Mainstream, we’re the number one installing reseller Cisco and Meraki gear in the Northeast. So we said well what does Cisco have? Well we looked a little bit. We didn’t really find much. Then I was at a conference late last year and I went to a presentation and they were talking about what Cisco had now. Wow, wow, wow. So we started using it on a trial basis and then we started providing some trials for some of our clients and they were impressed as can be. As am I. It’s nice to get rid of that spam.
So rule number one, if your business don’t send unsolicited emails, you will get nailed for it. And usually what ends up happening is your website, your domain starts getting a bad reputation. And if your reputation starts to drop, you will no longer have your emails delivered. So places like a Google, no Gmail. Gmail or AOL or even Yahoo are going to say this this domain has a bad reputation. So your legitimate emails are going to start getting dropped as well. So you have to be very, very careful. And even if you’re using a web server somewhere else, we found with our clients two different problems. One is that they’re using someone else to send out email on their behalf. And frankly it is spam and I tell him to quit doing it but they keep doing it. But there are references in those emails to their domain and that is causing them to get flagged as spammers. So their reputation’s going down. And then on top of that, they’re doing a couple of other things that just cause nothing but headaches and nothing but problems. And that is sometimes just sending it out from their own domains. But the vendors they’re using, and that just boggles my mind.
This company is in the direct business to consumer business. So they’re selling products, fairly hard to get items, to consumers. And so they go to third parties and the third parties are sending out these emails on their behalf, which are frankly mostly spam because they don’t clean their list. When people ask to unsubscribe, they don’t unsubscribe. They don’t keep it up, right? They’re not doing the right things. And so the companies are using, obviously, to send these emails, to send these “marketing messages”. These companies don’t know what they’re doing either. So their servers are sitting in an address range, right? And those addresses that they’re using also end up getting, basically, blacklisted. They are much worse than just having your identity hurt. So those servers get blacklisted. So right now if you want to run a mail server and you run it over in Amazon’s Cloud, AWS or in anyone’s cloud, frankly, you’re going to get blacklisted.
So I’m seeing that happen with a number my clients and I keep telling them not to do that one in particular. Don’t do that, don’t do that, don’t do that. I have another client that just wanted to send out the thing to his email list. And he hasn’t sent any e-mails to that list in 6 months or year. He’s going to have a similar problem and that is those emails are going to go out. Some of them are going to bounce coz people change email addresses. And if enough of those emails bounced at certain providers, then they’re going to get a bad reputation which means fewer and fewer of their emails are going to actually be deliverable. So if you do have a legitimate email list, you have to keep using it coz if you don’t, you’re going to get yourself blacklisted.
Well in this case this guy was charged, his name is Michael Persaud he’s in Scottsdale Arizona, with sending out emails, spam. It wasn’t really sending out spam email. The indictment is kind of interesting here because it’s saying that he used multiple IP addresses and domains to send spam emails over at least nine networks, including several servers in Chicago. He sent more than a million spam emails to people in the US and abroad using, and this is where he got really nailed, false names to register domains, creating fraudulent from address fields. To conceal the fact that he was the one sending emails he used a bunch of different aliases. A California company called Impact Media LLC and he got all these stuff sent out. He lied to these companies that were sending emails on his behalf. He lied to the companies that he was renting servers from. And now everyone’s reputation got hurt. And remember in the online community, in the online world, if your reputation gets hurt, it means that your other clients aren’t going to be able to send emails. Because they’re going to be assumed to be spam because the IP addresses are coming from or because of the domains that you’re using. So be very, very careful. We should do a whole thing on spam someday. If you’re interested, let me know. There is a lot to know. There’s a lot to do. But spam is bad. It’s dangerous. Don’t do it. Don’t ever do it. It’s going to hurt you. It’s gonna hurt your business. It’s going to hurt your product. You cannot go out and rent a mailing list. This isn’t like the US Post Office. This is a lot different. And if you try and “rent” a mailing list, of people who have “opted in”, the odds are excellent you’re going to hurt your online reputation. These automated systems are going to start blocking your emails. And you’re going to be in a whole lot of trouble and in a very bad spot because frankly you not going to be able to do much online market anymore because you’ve kind of destroyed it yourself.
Alright visit me online, http://CraigPeterson.com. We’re getting ready for our weekly terrestrial radio show as well. So if you have any questions, by all means, send them to me. We’re going to start answering questions that you have here on the daily, as well as, on the weekly radio show and podcast. So if you have questions, just send them to producer@CraigPeterson.com. If you have something urgent, I’m always available to help answer your quick urgent question. You can just text me right there. Very, very easy. http://CraigPeterson.com. You have got my toll-free phone number there. You can even call and leave a voicemail message.
Hey have a great day. We will be back tomorrow with another TechSanity check and I hope you really are having a great week. You know it’s warm here in the Northeast. It’s like springtime. I love it. Take care. Bye bye.
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