Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Did NBCSearch Spam?

I've heard of NBCSearch and Mainstream Advertising before but never paid them any attention until 2 copies of the following showed up in my generic inboxes the other day, like sales, support, info, you know the things most companies have that you can randomly use to send email when you don't actually know a real email address.

Hello,

My name is Sarkis Arshakuni and I am the Director of Business Development here at NBCSearch, SearchABC, and the Mainstream Search Network of sites. I have heard great things about the capability of your network and I know we would benefit from working together.

I'm interested in pursuing a strategic partnership. Mainstream Search and it's family of sites make us the largest online advertising company. And with the success of TrueClick our click fraud detection technology we have been developing and growing relationships with several tier one search companies. We have broad coverage, high CPCs and the best 2nd tier traffic on the market.

Below is our XML Test Feed for your review:

http://carcassonne.ozemailer.com/[snip]

Feel free to paste this into a browser and change out the keyword so you can see the strength of our coverage and bid prices. Once you view these, I am confident you will want to begin ASAP. Here's our sign up link to get started:

http://carcassonne.ozemailer.com/[snip]


Please let me know if you have any questions or will be available for a quick chat about this partnership. I look forward to hearing from you or the appropriate person so we can explore further.


Thanks in advance,

Sarkis Arshakuni
Business Development
[snip]
________________________
http://www.Mainstreamadvertising.com
http://www.Mainstreamasearch.com
[snip]

Anyway, out of curiosity I went to NBCSearch and the McAfee SiteAdvisor went off, then I looked and they don't appear to be indexed in Google whatsoever, and of all things they have a private registration on their domain name which is odd for a corporation.
Domain Name: NBCSEARCH.COM

Registrant [207419]:
Moniker Privacy Services
Lot's of red flags so I think I'll skip inquiring about advertising.

But thanks for asking... not!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Seems perfectly reasonable to me - if you were irritating people by spamming generic email addresses would you leave your details plastered over the web with a non-protected domain reg? ;)

(while the b & i tags may be mentioned on the comment form, I'm glad to see em and strong actually work as well)

Anonymous said...

Got the same mail.. twice.. NBC Search :)

Anonymous said...

I used to work for this company. They are INDEED spammers. The so-called president of the company goes by the name Daniel Kay. He is in fact Daniel Khooshnood who was sued by Microsoft and lost a $4M lawsuit against them for spamming.

These guys are shady and practice unethical business practices such as shaving clicks from affilaiets, indescriminently cutting affilaite payments wjhen they don't have enough money to pay their affilaites. Be warned...these guys are crooks.