Comments on: Quechup is rotten: don't accept invites

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Even WORSE – I unsubscribed within minutes but Quechup STILL spammed my address book 3 days later and is still keeping my “profile” up as a filler. I know this because I’m continuing to emails that random people are adding me, and the only way to change my preferences is to subscribe back up.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

They're using astroturfing to defend themselves. A sock puppet named Hayley is posting an identical comment to blogs that criticize quechup. Wonder if we'll get one here...

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Sad that these guys are doing such things. Anyone blogger interested in decampaigning them so that they should be brought down?

By: henway joey

henway joey — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Teresa,

Whoa. I didn’t realize that type of site was so shady…

I am definitely not affiliated with them. I’m just a BoingBoing reader and a student. Seriously.

By: Liz

Liz — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I got that email from Rapleaf as well, and it seems a fairly widespread attempt to get you to log in and hand over your details.

By: Adam Stanhope

Adam Stanhope — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

“Yaari.com,” a social-networking site for Indians and their friends around the world behaves similarly. Stay away from Yaari.com as well!

By: Halloween Jack

Halloween Jack — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks for the tip. Who’s behind this gang of bandits? I’m afraid even to go to their site to see if they identify themselves.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Wow! Great post.

By: sinoptik

sinoptik — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I had a bunch of invite e-mails this autumn from people whom I could never suspect to invite me to such network.
So, now the mystery is solved.
I wonder did they thought about consequences and community reaction to this dirty trick?

By: Eduardo Padoan

Eduardo Padoan — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Can someone tell what is the subject of this messages, so I can create a a filter on Gmail to automatically delete it?

By: Xeni Jardin

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

@Eduardo: it’s “Invite from [name] [email address]” and it’s generated from the user email, not [something@quechup.com], which gets past many people’s trust filters.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Yeah,I believe Tagged does the same thing – I’m in Mexico City and periodically I get emails from way too many people that say “So-and-so has tagged you… ” But I figured out awhile ago, it doesn’t give you the option to choose who you invite, it just invites everyone…

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

It’s unclear from the story: is this just another Windows exploit? An update with details of what systems are affected would be appreciated.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

mark@quechup.com is the CEO

By: tallskinnykiwi

tallskinnykiwi — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Quechup sucks! I warned about them on my blog and deleted my account.

But the following day, they still spammed everyone on my email list, despite me no longer being a subscriber.

As well as deleting my account, I should have changed the password on my email and i advise others in my shoes to do the same.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Oh, of course it’s my first name there, so now i’m paranoid even though i’ve never heard of or used quechup. :P

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Aw. I feel unpopular now. I haven’t gotten any Quechup invites.

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hey, wait — does the mail go out from your own account or through their server? That’s something filterable. I’d like to put it into Despammed if it’s that easy.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

wonder if it could be this Mark https://engineering.purdue.edu/ECE/People/Alumni/WallOfFame/Classes/1992/505/view

By: Xeni Jardin

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s an example with header info, actual victim’s details deleted:

——–

From: VICTIM@gmail.com
Subject: Invite from VICTIM (VICTIM@gmail.com)
Date: September 3, 2007 9:36:36 PM PDT
To: XENI’S ADDRESS
Reply-To: (VICTIM@gmail.com)
Return-Path:
Delivered-To: XENI’S ADDRESS
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.1.9 (2007-02-13) on XENI’S EMAIL SERVER
X-Spam-Level:
X-Spam-Status: No, score=-2.6 required=7.0 tests=BAYES_00,HTML_MESSAGE autolearn=ham version=3.1.9
Received: (qmail 14572 invoked from network); 3 Sep 2007 21:39:48 -0700
Received: from mail2.quechup.com (HELO www1.quechup.com) (212.100.231.184) by XENI’S EMAIL SERVER with SMTP; 3 Sep 2007 21:39:47 -0700
Received: by www1.quechup.com (Postfix, from userid 48) id E56A52B3517; Tue, 4 Sep 2007 05:36:36 +0100 (BST)
Sender: “Quechup”
X-Mailer: PHP v5.2.3
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary = “1c0ee4632942be820932c592055b2695″
Message-Id: <20070904043636.E56A52B3517@www1.quechup.com>

By: Jun-Dai

Jun-Dai — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The oldest reference to the problem I can find online is here:

http://lilsabub.livejournal.com/46814.html

I’m not sure if the problem has really been around for 18 months and has just taken this long to explode, or if it’s been on and off. In any case, the bulk of blog complaints seem to be within the last month.

By: brownpau

brownpau — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve come to refer to this method of spam as the “SMS.ac model.”

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

maybe not ! it’s probably that Mark Finch from iDate

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Anally rapes? My, that’s harsh.

By: Teresa Nielsen Hayden/Moderator

Teresa Nielsen Hayden/Moderator — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Joey, belated thanks for the human answer.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

the lawyers are called “Loeb and Loeb”? “Andrew Loeb” is the name of the fictional lawyer in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, the insane one that ended up coming after them with a bow and arrow. I’d avoid those lawyers…

By: henway joey

henway joey — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Has anyone gotten an invite for Rapleaf.com? Seems like a pretty legit site, though the invite I got from someone I had never talked to before said they vouched that I am a “good person”. I signed up anyway, it seems pretty cool, though I doubt it’s a perfect way to tell anyone’s true online reputation.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Another site, spymac.com did this last year. It’s so embarrassing when your boss gets an invite to this dodgy site, and thinks you’re behind it.

I never recommend stuff, so everyone assumed that it must be really great if I went to that much trouble!

Despicable behaviour.

By: Woodstock

Woodstock — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Granted, if you give them access to your address book, which I was dumb enough to do, you’ve pretty much opened the door for them to spam all your contacts.

On the other hand, no matter what the TOS it seems pretty damn shady that they didn’t start sending invites out to my contacts until *after* I’d closed my account. There is some good info and are some informative links here http://microformats.org/wiki/social-network-anti-patterns

By: Teresa Nielsen Hayden/Moderator

Teresa Nielsen Hayden/Moderator — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I am so not impressed with Rapleaf.com. I went and had a look at the site an hour or two ago. Now–surprise!–I have mail from them:

Rapleaf Reputation
3:00 pm (17 minutes ago)
Dear Teresa,

Someone researched your reputation on Rapleaf by searching “tnh@panix.com”.

To view (or update) your profile, check out:
http://www.rapleaf.com/pub/Teresa-Hayden

Even though your profile is incomplete, the person who searched you found some basic reputational information on you. At Rapleaf, you can find such information as age, location, history, social network links, and more on over 60 million people.

Your friends at Rapleaf.com
http://www.rapleaf.com

Yeah, sure. People who have information on Teresa Hayden either don’t know me, or are talking about someone else.

I’ve gotten messages like this before from other sites. They tell you someone’s been checking on your reputation, so naturally you go there to see what they’ve got on you. Generally, it’s a name and address. If you fall for it, you update your profile, which gives them valuable social networking information about you.

Joey? Say something about yourself that’s got nothing to do with Rapleaf.