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.
I’ve had employees of mine do that. I’m sure whomever works for trafficz that did that is in a heap of shit.
Wow. Ridiculous!
Kevin and Ammar are two of the most professional people I know. I’m sure some employee is presently walking the plank over this.
***UPDATED BY ELLIOT***
I feel badly for the human error, but now people have a huge list of email addresses of domain owners, buyers, investors…etc.
I got the same email, now just wait until someone does a reply-all with their W9 attached 🙂
Shame on Jesse Lakes. That’s even more blatantly irresponsible to take advantage of a mistake.
I emailed them last night to cancel my account (that I don’t use) and to remove my email address from their list.
I still have not heard a response.
Agree with Anon. The original sender screwed up, it was a mistake. You’re in a hurry, it’s end of year, you have a million things to do and you need W9s to clean up loose ends — easy to accidentally paste to CC instead of BCC.
Jesse on the otherhand, deliberately spammed the list and starting an email with “sorry for spamming you” does not excuse spamming anymore than “sorry for robbing you” excuses theft.
I’m always astounded by spams that open with an apology for spamming. As the kids say, WTF? Does the spammer think that admitting to jerkishness somehow mitigates it?
How can TrafficZ clients have any confidence in the
security of their private tax information when there
appears to be no strict procedures in place to stop
any employee being so cavalier with confidential data ?
To explain this as an ‘accident’ misses the point.
With *confidential* data, NO ‘accidents’ are tolerable.