PetitionSpot.com – Sign a Petition, Sign-up for SPAM

Update 5-September-2008:  I was contacted by the new owner of PetitionSpot.com today and was told that they have completely redesigned and refocused the site.  According to the e-mail, all spamming by the previous owner has been eliminated. I haven’t verified this but hopefully the situation over at PatitionSpot.com has improved since I originally posted.

Original Post:

I’ve started receiving 3 unsolicited SPAM e-mails a day from a company called “AmazingOffers”. Receiving SPAM is not really a big deal, but don’t you always wonder how they found your address? This time, it appears PetitionSpot.com gave them my address.

Why do I suspect this? I gave PetitionSpot.com a honeypot e-mail address that I have never given any other site. I received zero activity on it for months. Then, I suddenly started receiving 3 SPAM messages each day to this address.

I think PeitionSpot and AmazingOffers (aka OptInRealBig.com) are linked together. There is a possibility that AmazingOffers stole my e-mail address from PetitionSpot. Sharing my address would violates the PetitionSpot terms of service:

  • Your contact information is confidential and we will not share it with any third party without your consent
  • We will not send you unsolicited email, unless there is a need to send you important or urgent information relating to your user account or usage of this website.

AmazingOffers is acting as if it is a US-based company sending out “legitimate” spam. But they include an invalid street address (broken zip code) and provide no link to their website. They do include an unsubscribe link but these are suspicious because they each message points to a different server, including asp010.com, asp050.com, gg02.com, hh02.com, mailmx02.com, mailmx04.com, mx02.net, mx03.net, rr03.com, texams.com. Here is the contact information included in the SPAM e-mails (notice the incomplete zip code):

AmazingOffers – ADVERTISEMENT
1333 W 120th Ave. Suite 101
Westminster, Colorado 8023

I did some research and apparently they previously sent out their real contact information in SPAM messages and I found it on ToastedSpam.com:

OptInRealBig.com, LLC
1333 W 120th Ave Suite 101
Westminster, CO 80234

Google Map Link

I contacted PetitionSpot about this on 28-Oct-2006, but received no response. For now, I recommend avoiding PetitionSpot.com. I never gave my permission to receive e-mail from AmazingOffers (or what ever their name is) but yet they e-mail me 3 times a day. This is unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail and I do not approve.

2014-05-27

6 Comments

  1. I’ve been using petitionspot for 9 months and have received no spam.. It’s a good site. Once, it was even promoted on MichaelMoore.com I think…

  2. Tim, I’m glad you have not received any third-party spam. I hope PetitionSpot is not in league with the sender of the Spam. Perhaps time will tell.

    On a positive note, I did try the unsubscribe link on the AmazingOffers (OptInRealBig.com) spam e-mails and it appeared to have worked.

  4. This is funny. Some idiot read the title of this post and thought that by replying to it, they could sign someone else up for spam. They were not bright enough to realize that I’m saying PetitionSpot.com does this.

    I’ve looked around PetitionSpot.com some more recently. The site must have changed hands because there is zero moderation of content there. Many petitions simply contain links to sites of questionable reputation. There are also slanderous and inappropriate petitions and comments.

    Any such comments posted here will be deleted. Please keep the comments related to any inappropriate behavior by PetitionSpot.com.

  5. I’ve also received spam from these ‘folks’. Here’s the latest email header:
    Return-Path:
    Received: from 125.mailzaps.com (125.mailzaps.com [64.79.204.125])
    Received: (from daemon@localhost)

    These guys know exactly how to forge headers, it looks like that’s the case. When I did a DNS search, it shows OptinRealBig.com NET-64-79-204-0-24 as the sender. So contact the Hosting provider for OptinRealBig.com, and you can shut them down with spam complaints.

  6. I looked-up all of the headers, and there were about 20 different originating servers. Luckily, they do provide opt-out links that do work (even though they point to different servers in pretty much every e-mail, I was unsubscribed from all of them.) Now for sending me mail in the first place – without my consent – that is the real problem.

Comments are closed.