Bjorn Says

Is Dirk Wagner A Spammer?

I got a disturbing comment on an old post about one of Dirk Wagners old Crazy Weekend deals, claiming that Dirk Wagner was sending out spam. After contacting the reader to see if there was any truth to this, and reading through the material provided, I decided to approve the comment. I also decided to write a post about it, because it seems pretty disturbing and very alarming to me that someone I’ve seen as a pretty decent and serious marketer would engage in this type of criminal activity.

The spam-mail in question looks like this:

Oferta que vale la pena mirar.

Pack compuestos por Software, Video Marketers Tool Kit,
Plantillas,eWriter Pro y Internet Marketing Lost Secrets entre otros.
Lo más asombroso es el precio de cada uno y como si fuera poco,
licencia de reventa a través de una replica de esta web con tu login
de PayPal para tu cobrar directamente y sin intermediarios.

Visitanos en en el siguiente link

http://www.dirkscrazyweek.com/previous.html

It offers that it is worthwhile to look.

Pack composed by Software, Video Marketers Tool Kit,
Plantillas,eWriter For and Internet Marketing Lost Secrets among
others.

The most astonishing thing is the price of each one and as if it was
little, resale license through one replies of this web with your login
of PayPal for your to get paid directly and without middlemen

Visit one another in in the following link

http://www.dirkscrazyweek.com/previous.html

I don’t know a single word of Spanish (ok, i know how to order eight beers but that’s about it), so I can’t comment on the language and grammar on that part, but the English part… It doesn’t seem to be written by anyone naturally fluent in English. This leads me to the conclusion that Dirk didn’t send out the mail, which in turn leads to the conclusion that it must be someone trying to get a quick affiliate-commission. But as you can see, it’s not an affiliate-link being promoted. The only one making a couple of bucks on this mail, is Dirk Wagner.

The way this type of spam works, is that it uses a bot-net (hijacked computers running a quiet irc-app with bot-scripts waiting for commands from the bot-master) to send out mails from innocent peoples computers, using an existing email-address in the “from” and “reply-to” parts of the mail-headers. When a mail bounces (gets sent back due to the recipient being non-existant), it goes straight to email-address in the reply-to part of the header. When it gets delivered, the unsuspecting company seems to be the sender, which can easily lead to the innocent company’s ip and domain being black-listed, which makes the delivery of legit, genuine mails from the victim company pretty much impossible to servers that use the black-lists.

With that technicality out of the way, I’ve been a victim of this type of sender-spoofing myself a couple of times, but the mails sent using my return-addresses have never promoted products by Internet Marketers, only viagra, drugs, Nigeria-scams and other well-known types of scams. I’ve always reported these to SpamCop and other organisations myself to avoid my domains being blacklisted.

Although the mail doesn’t seem to be written by Dirk Wagner or anyone working for Dirk Wagner, could that possibly be a way for the sender to disguise her/himself? “Sure, I made the money, but I didn’t write the mail!”. If Dirk or one of his staff didn’t send out the mail, why the h**l is he the one making money from any possible sales? It is well known that between 0.1% and 0.3% of the recipients of spam actually click through and sometimes even purchase. It is also well known that you can purchase a mass-send of an email to any number of recipients for a pretty low price. So if this mail goes out to 1 million receivers, Dirk stands to make money from 1-3000 visitors.

So the question is - Is Dirk Wagner A Spammer? What do you think? Have you been the victim of sender-spoofing?