Golden Spiders Ordered To Pay €500 For Spamming Brightspark
December 11, 2007 at 11:57 am
Back in October, I was spammed many times by the people who run the Golden Spiders - Business & Finance magazine. Irritating, but above all, law breaking. Today we have arrived at an ‘amicable conclusion’ to this affair. I have accepted the Data Commissioner’s suggestion that the Golden Spiders be fined €500 and the money goes to a charity. In a way it’s a win for the little people, but the conclusions I have drawn from this whole affair would definitely push me in the direction of breaking the law myself in the future.
When I run email campaigns for clients, I ensure that the lists are all fully opted in. I take the time to explain to clients about what is fair game and what’s not for email purposes. A lot of time is spent before each send cleaning lists, and cross referencing from previous campaigns to make sure that nobody receives an email who should not.
The Golden Spiders people take a different approach. They seem to have multiple lists which they just fire off at a whim. My problem in October came because I had unsubscribed from their list and continued to receive emails. This is because the Golden Spiders people don’t take the time that Brightspark does in data cleansing.
I was frustrated and disappointed in October when I brought this to the attention of the Data Commissioners Office (the email police) because all they did was reprimand the Golden Spiders by mail. I simply had to accept the Golden Spiders answer that this would not happen again. Read the “data commissioners are a waste of time’ post here.
Fast forward to last week. And another email arrives from the Golden Spiders. Are they thick or what?
I duly sent this straight to the Data Commissioners, who came back with an offer of an amicable resolution. I get to nominate a charity and the Golden Spiders who have made massive profits on this year’s event, get to pay €500 to that charity.
Conclusions:
- You can get away with email spamming in this country. Just make sure you have a budget of €500 for charitable donations if you are unlucky enough to have a grouchy person report you to the Data Commissioners
- You must be spammed an average of 6 times before an amicable solution will be suggested.
- If we want to change the law and the powers that the Data Commissioners have, we must lobby for change to SI535. This involves schmoozing with the Minister for Communications which will take an awful lot of time and energy.
- In the meantime, do what you like…
PS - the charity I chose is Daisyhouse which provides housing to single homeless adults. You too can donate here…
Wednesday 12 Dec : Thanks to the people who gave me some help on this, I got some coverage on this in Silicon Republic. and in Irish Dev.
Comments (12 responses)
A small win, but a win all the same - well done. Though I’m guessing the loss in billable hours spent following up all this is a lot more than 500 bucks. Here’s hoping they learnt their lesson
Fair play. Now all we need to do is address the issue of unsolicited phone calls that they’re making also.
Yes Ken, I think you should take that one and run with it!!
A nice display of leadership from MR. For every professional who gets in gear to complain, there are 100 consumers who switch off to the internet and e-mail marketing because they’re being spammed.
Maryrose
Great job and well done on persevering.
But some good has come from the complaints-
(Michelle Neylon also blogged about this same email)
in that the Senderscore.org reputation report for the sending IP of that newsletter is currently marked as “High Risk” with a very low delivery rate. So in many cases the email is stopped at the gate.
Pointing would be irish spammers to your post and some of Michelle’s (ie the one about Monster) is also good education -for some- It is starting to trickle through that for the email business it’s about delivery and not just price alone.
Chris
Well done on getting something back, I’ve also been plagued by them with Spam, so hooray for doing something about it, I just clicked the report spam button on GMail. Who incidentally, seem to take the problem of Spam more seriously than their friends at Redmond. My hotmail account is pretty unusable at the minute due to spam volume.
[...] Sometimes I use it to push out a recent blog post. For example, when I was complaining about being spammed by the Golden Spiders, I popped a note on Twitter to say that I had posted something really important on my blog… (and there’s a happy ending to that story!) [...]
[...] I think this story of the Golden Spiders organisers ‘guilty’ of spamming just about sums it up for this particular ‘awards’ [...]
[...] that the Golden Spider award team have been ordered to pay €500 to Brightspark Consulting, see http://brightspark-consulting.com/blog/?p=424 [...]
[...] the €500 they agreed to pay to a charity of my choice for their blatant and multiple spamming. View post. The agreement was made on 11 December and the people at Daisyhouse were delighted at the prospect of [...]
I received spam this morning from nottheactualaddress at the mytown.ie Irish tld. I replied (yes not advised but given it was an Irish domain I took the short route) and received a reply informing me that they “found” my address on browse Ireland. I think Irish spammers (particularly those with a .ie domain) are seriously letting the side down. What can I do?
You can read the full story to date here:
http://backupanytime.com/blog/?p=122
Thanks
John
[...] The Golden Spider Awards were fined something as small as €500 for doing exactly the same last year. We all knew then it was a joke and they’d be at it again this year… €500 is very little to pay for the amount of people they can spam. Here’s an article on it http://brightspark-consulting.com/blog/2007/12/golden-spiders-ordered-to-pay-e500-for-spamming-brigh... [...]
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