With the price of gold sky-high, the profits to be made must be equally impressive, turning side-show companies like “Goldline International” into first rate spammers.
Either that, or the high price has brought competitor’s out of the woodwork, making them so desperate for business they’ve now turned to spam.
Either way, whether it’s gouging customers, desperate for business or just ethically bankrupt the “Goldline” spam has hit the main vain.
The emails from their advertisements, SEO campaigns or third-party affiliates arrive with a subject line that currently announces:
Subject: Now Is The Time To Buy Gold!
These are blasted out from a wide variety of disposable sending domains using addresses that are “From:”
- “Goldline Gold” <gold_@elaicnanga.info>
- “Goldline Gold” <gold_@wrideweeze.info>
- “Goldline Gold” <gold_@ninerheild.info>
- “Goldline Gold” <gold_@gteaulidia.info>
- “Goldline Gold” <gold_@bugrepreta.info>
- “Goldline Gold” <gold_@strixgunja.info>
- “Goldline” <gold_@quitoglump.info>
- “Goldline” <gold_@ichthbais.info>
And the list goes on…
When we say “disposable domains” what we mean is a domain that was just recently registered and will only be used until too many spam filters block it. At that point it will be tossed aside and another temporary domain will replace it.
For example, here’s the WHOIS data for the last domain listed above:
Domain ID:D40237319-LRMS
Domain Name:ICHTHBAIS.INFO
Created On: 18-Aug-2011 05:27:31 UTC
The actual email contains mostly images, pushing their “Free Investor Kit” (using the word investor very loosely here) like this:
Click for Larger Image
These images are hosted on the same disposable domains that send the junk email, and these then link to the main http://goldlinegold.com/ web site via tracking URLs.
The tracking URLS are customized to allow them to see which spam campaigns or affiliates have sent the traffic to their site, and also which recipients have been foolish enough to read and respond to their spam emails.
On their web site they say:
For 50 years, Goldline International has served precious metals investors with a full range of products, including gold, silver and platinum coins and bars, numismatic and collectible coins, and rare currency.
They also list a phone number: 866-560-9432
We have to wonder what causes a business with “50 years” experience to stoop to the level of spamming the masses. Generally we’ve come to expect spam from start-ups and pure con artists. If their claim of history is accurate, what could make them so desperate as to join the ranks of the pill-pushers, junk replica merchandise marketers, stock pump and dump fraudsters and the like?
We don’t know the answer, but it’s a question that any potential customer should be asking themselves.
A few other questions we would suggest pondering:
- If they’re so eager and willing to send spam from disposable domains (or to hire outsiders to do this for them) what other rules are they willing to break and what other business shortcuts do they take?
- It’s risky enough to buy anything from a spammer as counterfeit goods are typically marketed this way; so what kind of risk is there in buying what is presumed to be “gold” from such a company?
- And, even if the products they sell are legitimate, then what kind of price gouging must be involved to entice and convert them into joining the ranks or ordinary spammers?
Of course, it’s entirely possible that they’ve been prolifically spamming for years and we’ve just now noticed it.
Regardless, we notice that they use the word “invest” and “investor” a lot on their site, but another term comes to mind entirely: “a fool and his money…”
- -
OnlyMyEmail is an award winning hosted spam filtering service and business email hosting provider. Our enterprise cloud computing anti-spam solution, the MX-Defender, has the highest capture rate of any spam filter ever tested in the VBSpam Challenge, blocking a record setting 99.9993% of all malicious and junk email.
Our Personal spam filtering system is also a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution and has won both the PC World "World Class Award" and also the PC Magazine "Editor's Choice Award."
OME-Kids is a webmail solution that protects children from spam and other harmful emails. OME-Kids offers unique Parental Controls that allow you to choose the level of security and oversight that's right for your child.
Related posts:
Tags: spam
