Domain Parking

TrafficZ apologized for accidentally disclosing over 1,500 email addresses when they forgot to BCC all recipients. In an email from TrafficZ, Ammar Kubba said:

“We at TrafficZ would like to extend our sincerest apologies to you and each of the other disclosed recipients of yesterday’s mass accounting email…“

However, this has not stopped the domain spam emails that I have been receiving. Just now, I received an email from Laura Fluehr, offering me her junk domain names, including one that would seem to infringe on Toys ‘R’ Us and Babys ‘R’ Us trademarks, BabyGiftsRUs.com.
Making this even more annoying is that I haven’t used TrafficZ in over two years (maybe longer) and had no reason to receive any communications from thom. I know this was an unfortunate error, but the ramifications suck. I already closed whatever account they had on record for me and asked for my email address to be removed from their database.

I haven’t used TrafficZ in a couple of years, and it was for just a brief period of time. However, today I received an email from them sent to their clients:

“Dear valued TrafficZ client:
We hope this email finds you well. We have attempted to contact you previously regarding the collection of tax related documentation relating to your TrafficZ account. In order to make payments to our clients, TrafficZ is legally required to collect certain tax related documentation from all of our clients, including those based outside the United States.…”etc.

This email continued, but that isn’t the problem here. Unfortunately, the sender of the email didn’t blind carbon copy the 1,500+ email recipients. Every single email address that was on the mailing list was left for all others to see. This is a huge invasion of privacy, as one person already decided to spam the list with his crappy domain names. This is the spam email I just received from someone harvesting the list:

“Dear TrafficZ User,
Sorry to inconvenience anyone but your email, like mine, was just released by TrafficZ. I apologize having to use this method but its awfully ironic that I just got handed a list of people who buy and sell domain names just as I determined I really need to sell two of my domain names in the very near future…”
“If you are the least bit interested please let me know. I need to make some money ASAP to keep paying off my damn Adjustable Rate mortgage.
Sorry for any inconvenience,
Jesse Lakes“

Shame on TrafficZ for not managing their email list better, and shame on this person for sending this annoying spam email.

Back in April, I received a phone call from a person with Sendori asking me about an application made using my domain names. The submitted email address was different than my Whois email address, and they wanted to verify the application. I thought it might have been made by a web developer working on my behalf since I never heard of the company before the phone call, but it turns out a scammer had applied for an account using my domain names and reputation.

For a couple of weeks in April, I put 5 domain names in my DNForum signature, and I had one new registration listed for sale in the offers section. Someone used those 6 domain names to apply for at least one parking company account (ParkingPanel.com) in addition to an account at Sendori. Perhaps they applied to other companies, but these were the two that contacted me due to the difference in the application email and my Whois email. The purpose of doing this, as I later found out, was to generate click fraud. The scammer somehow masked traffic and clicks to generate revenue. I am not good with the technical aspect of domain management, but apparently traffic looked like it was coming from these domain names even though the DNS was set elsewhere.

When ParkingPanel caught on, they immediately called me and told me what occurred. The account manager heard of me on one of the forums and knew I wouldn