When we think of 'spammers', we usually picture an offshore group of criminal individuals, pushing fake pills from websites that are outside the direct reach of U.S. law. But there's another group of spammers, who are closer to home. These are the home-grown, shady direct marketers who have crossed the line from legitimacy to spam.
These shady direct marketers play fast and loose with the law, but they don't want to go to jail. So they've developed some interesting tricks, exploiting what they believe are loopholes in the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act.
As you may know, CAN-SPAM permits marketers to send commercial email without first getting consent from the recipient. As I noted in November, this is different from the laws in most of the rest of the world. So it's not illegal to email someone, as long as you give them an easy way to opt-out of receiving any more commercial email from them, and quickly honor such requests.
Some 'enterprising' direct marketers have decided that if they frequently change the name of their company, they don't need to worry about paying attention to opt-out requests.
News 6 months ago
