Image by Zach Bogart - The Noun Project
As part of my journey uncovering email spammers, I have started publishing some of my results on LinkedIn and tagging individuals in organisations, especially the senior leaders. This strategy is definitely starting to have some impact. In the past two incidents I have received responses from the organisations involved, either by the person who has been tagged or someone who works in the organisation.
Dialogue is good, it means they are taking the exposure seriously. I’m not sure everyone knows that LinkedIn has a super powerful search engine and therefore the possibility of negative press and exposure is a very real possibility. At least I am discovering a positive method for using LinkedIn, instead of just posting adverts about what I am doing and promoting my business, which is basically how most use LinkedIn, that and of course the personal Facebook-like posts that are appearing all over these days.
After posting my spam report I received a comment from the head of Talent Michael Beaulne. I was pleased with the tone of his message (see below) to an extend but it still suggested that they were in their rights to send me this email and that they were offering value. Of course I know the USA is far less regulated compared to the EU and the U.K. and behave like the Wild West when it comes to privacy and people’s data. You only need to look at Facebook who have led the way in selling our data for financial gain.
Michael Beaulne:
Hi Michael, noticed the post and thought I would share a few thoughts. We just surpassed 3000 employees a week or so ago and we are growing very quickly. I consider Spam email that gives me no value and isn't worth my time. I get people contacting me offering their services and it isn't really spam, they are just offering their services or promoting what they do. We offer great expertise and we hire the best talent. It is an amazing place to work, I have the most amazing team of people, distributed and diverse. As we are hiring 300 +/- a month, I don't believe networking and getting the word out is considered as spam, to those interested in the connection.
Anyway, I did go back to him to suggest that I still felt it wasn’t enough and this was my response:
Michael de Groot:
I am certainly grateful that someone in the organisation takes the time to respond, thank you. I appreciate your point of view and of course I disagree as I would never have posted this.My definition of spam is when you have no previous relationship or interaction with a person or organisation, furthermore you have never heard of them and all of a sudden you discover that they have without your permission added your email to a database in order to send you unsolicited emails promoting their services. Worse still you discover that the sender’s name isn’t even easily discoverable on channels like LinkedIn. In addition the CEO doesn’t respond to a LinkedIn message you send to him, requesting to be removed from their database.
For individuals and organisations to be seen to be authentic and have integrity they must communicate with transparency and honesty. Hiring lead generation companies that don’t adhere to the organisation’s own values means they leave themselves exposed. If you go on windifferent’s website you will see two different photos of the owners (go to team via top menu) but the name is the exact same. This also was a massive red flag for me. Then when I click the unsubscribe button at the end of the email, you would normally expect to be redirected to a website, where you can click an unsubscribe button and in some cases provide feedback, you know the ones, usually provided by reputable mail server organisations like Mailchimp or Hubspot. In this case it just opened a new email window automatically addressing it to Jeremy Nolan. Another red flag of an email campaign that is not authentic or trustworthy.
There are so many things wrong with this approach in a world where the internet has turned into the Wild West of “anything goes”, in order to get eyeballs on content. The USA are the leaders of developing distrust on the internet and organisations like yours are just confirming this for me. My small voice will probably go nowhere but it will hopefully develop in a wave of users no longer accepting this kind of behaviour by organisations and will judge them accordingly.
You may have a fabulously impressive and growing organisation, well done, why then do you need to use these improper practises for finding new clients, it just doesn’t make any sense at all.
Normally I would expect someone to give up and just ignore my comments, but he didn't, he continued in the dialogue and it was quite positive actually:
Michael Beaulne:
Hi Michael, you are welcome as to my reply and of course we can agree to disagree about certain topics but I am always up for sharing opinions and discussing relevant topics. That said, I will share all I can in relation to the new comments.There are different kinds of unsolicited emails everyone receives. Some that are intentionally sent with criminal intent, trying to coerce, rob or steal something from someone. There are others that are trying to generate leads, there are others that are to promote products and services, there are others that are offering jobs and some that are just networking for people that share common interests. This is part of the 2020's landscape, we network to try and get the word out and in many cases, in my opinion, that's ok, times have changed. We must be diligent and understand, unsubscribe and learn how to identify their differences.
How I operate my team is based on the 3 qualities you mentioned and thank you for confirming that I am on the right track because I take pride in my team and what our objectives are. Integrity, honesty and transparency are crucial to our success hands down. We have discovered an issue with the unsubscribe and that is being corrected. My team is the team that would remove your email address and we certainly will, please send it to me in a direct message and we will take care of that. We also have new initiatives to help when people need something from us, live chat, should be ready in the next month or so.
For me and my team as being the ones to support people outside of our system or within our process, every voice matters, including yours and you have been heard. We take opinions and concerns and will work to better the impression and the vision of what we are trying to accomplish. I appreciate the discussion and can assure you that we will continue to try and improve the manner in which things are done and message they send.
Cheers,
Michael
I wasn’t really that sure what to do with this comment, he sounds actually really genuine and although I do believe he is not correct that it is okay to grab people’s emails and do what he calls ‘networking’, via email? I definitely don’t agree with this.
I decided to have a look at their top team on their website. (Image below)
I noticed a couple of faces that were familiar to me, Pablo Chamorro and Facundo Molina.
Screenshot of part of the leadership team shown on the BairesDev website, pay close attention to Pablo Chamorro and Facundo Molina
When I received the offending email, I investigated the email header and it was very clear that the email server used to send the email to me was windifferent.com. See email and email header below. It was during me researching that website that I located 2 profile photos of the team there.
Email from Jeremy Nolan - BairesDev
Email header showing windifferent.com as the sending email server
When you hover your mouse over each photograph, shown on the windifferent.com website, it shows that the name that is shown is exactly the same for both.
Profile photos of the alleged team at Windifferent
When hover over profile photo 1, the name is Paul Antolin
When hover over profile photo 2, the name is Paul Antolin
This was already a red flag to me and in fact I did mention that in my comments to Michael Beaulne on LinkedIn, so when I saw that Paul Antolin 1 and 2, are actually younger versions of Pablo Chamorro and Facundo Molina.
So I wrote this on the LinkedIn post:
Michael de Groot:
I took a closer look at the bairesdev website and spotted Pablo Chamorro and Facundo Molina in your team. But their faces looked so familiar to me and in fact the images of their younger versions appear on the WinDifferent website, both named as Paul Antolin. Of course I realise that Pablo is Paul and if you click on Paul Antolin, his profile is in fact Paul Antolin Chamorro, it is indeed his face but somewhat disguised like an alter ego and of course working for WinDifferent. So these guys are obviously living double lives, not suspicious at all! The integrity, honesty and transparency is astounding Michael.
This discovery of recognising these two guys from the Windifferent’s website and realising that they are actually in the leadership team at BairesDev confirms to me that there’s something very suspicious going on here.
I would love to report them somehow, but no idea where to even start.
I can start by highlighting the duplicate profile of Chamorro but I believe LinkedIn won’t take any action here as of course anyone can create a valid profile, with what appears a different profile image, company and email address. It will be quite tough to convince them that they are spamming me outside of LinkedIn, that is unlikely to be of any interest to them.
Unfortunately it is inconclusive and I have had no response as yet from Michael Beaulne with regard to my discovery of these two characters showing up on both company’s websites. If he does get back to me, I promise to add the outcome here.
Happy unspamming!
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