Kraft's Gevalia adds 'spam your friends' feature
Update (9:00 pm) Brian MacDonald called from Gevalia. He says if I tell him the email address that's being spammed, he'll find out how it got on their list and have it removed. Ah, yes, a little list washing. But I'm after an interview with someone knowledgeable about Gevalia's relentless spam campaign from throw-away email accounts and domain names, like deluxepinewood.info which is supposedly owned by Calvin Edwards.
Calvin supposedly lives on Wass Avenue in Brewster, Maine. The phone number listed in in Brewster, but it's not Calvin's. It belongs to someone who's getting annoyed by the calls for Calvin complaining about spam.
My guess is that Calvin is a fake name for a spam gang - often criminals - that's working on the Gevalia promotions.
Let's pick another source of the Gevalia spam: mazensite.info
Owner: Stephen Patterson. Number not in service.
Or how about this one: footsite.info
Owner: Louis Hahn. Number not in service.
Or this one: fourpants.info
Owner: BBQ Media (they own 14 other domains)
The phone number is for a business cell phone in Houston, Texas. "I've had several calls looking for BBQ media," the phone's owner told me. "If I get my hands on them, I'll BBQ their asses."
Do you sense a pattern here?
From more than a decade of tracking down spammers, it seems to me that Gevelia / Kraft are hiding behind third party whack-a-mole spammers to dump their unsolicited marketing - at the recipient's expense - into computer and mobile phone inboxes.
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Since I last wrote about Kraft's spam-friendly Gevalia coffee (the environmentally unfriendly coffee that comes in cup-sized packaging presumably since consumers are no longer capable of handling a measuring spoon ), they've sent me more than 100 junk mails. Just like they threatened / promised to do.
I called Kraft Canada's PR rep (12:30 pm AST, Feb 1, 2011) - that would be Lynne Galia, (w) (416) 441-5610, lynne.galia@kraft.com - and left a message asking for an invue about this non-stop assault on my inbox.
And while hunting for a media contact at Kraft Canada, I discovered that Kraft / Gevalia have added a new feature to offloading the cost of advertising to the recipient with their new 'spam your friends' feature.
[caption id="attachment_833" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Kraft Foods / Gevalia's Spam Your Friends Feature"]
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And according to their so-called 'privacy' policy, they promise start spamming your friend and to share your friend's email address with their 'partners' so that those partners can spam your friend as well.
And they admit to using web bugs and other spammer tricks to identify your IP address. Kind of makes a 'privacy' policy sound more like authorization to spy and annoy.
Meanwhile, the best I can do is raise awareness that Kraft is using junk mail to offload the cost of delivering their unwanted advertising to the recipient, and that packaging coffee in one-cup disposable containers is an insult to environmental responsibility.
-g
