Gevalia - Spamming Your Inbox For Eight Years?
'Gevalia is subscription-based coffee product sold by Kraft on a Web site, Gevalia.com. Spam abuse mailing lists are full of complaints about e-mails urging people to try the luxury European coffee, which includes an offer for a free coffee maker.
'The e-mail offers arrive many times each day at MSNBC.com. After about a month’s worth of requests for information, Kraft still hadn’t produced an audit trail for the e-mail. But it did say it works hard to prevent its affiliates from sending out spam."'
'Spam fighter Laura Atkins, president of the SpamCon Foundation, said Kraft is a classic example of a company that is quietly benefiting from spam, and not doing nearly enough to reel in spamming affiliates.
'“They are violating California state law and they don’t care,” she said.'
That wasn't me writing. That was MSNBC tech writer Bob Sullivan. In 2003, eight years ago, in an article title 'Who profits from spam? Surprise'.
The pattern has continued since then - blame the consumer, blame some rogue 'affiliate', offer to list wash (give me your email address so we can take complainers off our list - for now), and otherwise keep the spam engine running at full throttle.
Hell, with the growth in social media, let's get our affiliates to spam the daylights out of Twitter and Facebook users. Let's turn everybody into an affiliate. We'll add social media tools to the Spam Your Friends campaign so you can directly annoy them on Facebook, too. And we'll even pay you for being an asshat.
The height of corporate responsibility. Sad, innit?
Sullivan's article also quoted Dan Clements of CardCops.com who said the only effective way to stop out-of-control affiliates "...is to subpoena the beneficiary site."
Now there's a thought.
