Which Sebastian Foss is a spammer?

Obviously pissed by my post Fraud from the desk of Sebastian Foss, Sebastian Foss sent this email to Smart-IT-Consulting.com:

Remove your insults from your blog about my products and sites... as you may know promote-biz.net is not registered to my name or my company.. just look it up in some whois service. This is some spammer who took my software and is now selling it on his spammer websites. Im only selling my programs under their original .com domains and you did not receive any email from me since im only using doube-optin lists.

You may not know it - but insulting persons and spreading lies is under penalty.

Sebastian Foss
Sebastian Foss e-trinity Marketing Inc.
sebastian@etrinity-mail.com

Well, that's my personal blog, and I've a professional opinion about the software Sebastian Foss sells, more on that later. It's public knowledge that spammers do register domains under several entities to obfuscate their activities. I'm not a fed, and I'm not willing to track down each and every multiple respectively virtual personality of a spammer, so I admit that there's at least a slight possibility that the Sebastian Foss spamming my inbox from promote-biz.net is not the Sebastian Foss who wrote and sells the software promoted by the email spammer Sebastian Foss. Since I still receive email spam from the desk of Sebastian Foss at promote-biz.net, I think there's no doubt that this Sebastian Foss is a spammer. Well, Sebastian Foss himself calls him a spammer, and so do I. Confused? So am I. I'll update my other post to reflect that.

Now that we've covered the legal stuff, lets look at the software from the desk of Sebastian Foss.

• Blog Blaster claims to submit "ads" to 2,000,000 sites. Translation: Blog Blaster automatically submits promotional comments to 2 million blogs. The common description of this kind of "advertising" is comment spam.
  Sebastian Foss tells us that "Blog Blaster will automatically create thousands of links to your website - which will rank your website in a top 10 position!". The common description of this link building technique is link spam.
  The sales pitch signed by Sebastian Foss explains "I used it [Blog Blaster] to promote my other website called ezinebroadcast.com and Blog Blaster produced thousands of links to ezinebroadcast.com - resulting in a #1 position in Google for the term "ezine advertising service". So I understand that Sebastian Foss admits that he is a comment spammer and a link spammer.
  I'd like to see the written permissions of 2,000,000 bloggers allowing Sebastian Foss and his customers to spam their blogs: "Advertising using Blog Blaster is 100% SPAM FREE advertising! You will never be accused of spamming. Your ads are submitted to blogs whose owners have agreed to receive your ads." Laughable, and obviously a lie. Did Sebastian Foss remember that "spreading lies is under penalty"? Take care, Sebastian Foss!


• Feed Blaster with a very similar sales pitch aims to create the term feed spam. Also, it seems that FeedBlaster™ is a registered trademark of DigitalGrit Inc. And I don't think that Microsoft, Sun and IBM are happy to spot their logos on Sebastian Foss' site e-trinity Internetmarketing GmbH


• The Money License System aka Google Cash Machine seems to slip through a legal loophole. May be it's not explicit illegal to sell software build to to trick Google Adwords respectively AdSense or ClickBank, but using it will result in account terminations and AFAIK legal actions too.


• Instant Booster claims to spam search engines, and it does, according to many reports. The common term applied to those techniques is web spam.

All these domains (and there are countless more sites selling similar scams from the desk of Sebastian Foss) are registered by Sebastian Foss respectively his companies e-trinity Internetmarketing GmbH or e-trinity Marketing Inc.

He's in the business of newsgroup spam, search engine spam, comment spam ... probably there's no target left out. Searching for Sebastian Foss scam and similar search terms leads to tons of rip-off reports.

He's even too lazy to rephrase his sales pitches, click a few of the links provided above, then search for quoted phrases you saw on every sales pitch to get the big picture. All that may be legal in Germany, I couldn't care less, but it's not legit. Creating and selling software for the sole purpose of spamming makes the software vendor a spammer. And he's proud of it. He openly admits that he uses his software to spam blogs, search engines, newsgroups and whatever. He may make use of affiliates and virtual entities who send out the email spam, perhaps he got screwed by a chinese copycat selling his software via email spam, but is that relevant when the product itself is spammy?

What do you think, is every instance of Sebastian Foss a spammer? Feel free to vote in the comments.


Update 08/01/2007 Here is the next email from the desk of Sebastian Foss:

Hi,
thanks for the changes on your blog entry - however like i mentioned if you look up the domains which were advertised in the spam mails you will notice that they are not registered to me or my company. You can also see that visiting the sites you will see some guy took my products and is selling them for a lower price on his own websites where he is also copying all of my graphic files. The german police told me that they are receiving spam from your forms and that it goes directly to their trash... however please remove your entries about me from your blog - There is no sense in me selling my own products for a lower price on some cheap, stolen websites - if that would make sense then why do i have my own .com domains for my products ? I just want to make clear that im not sending out any spam mails - please get back to me.

Thanks,
Sebastian

Sebastian Foss
e-trinity Internetmarketing GmbH
sebastian@etrinity-mail.com

It deserves just a short reply:

It makes perfect sense to have an offshore clone in China selling the same outdated and pretty much questionable stuff a little cheaper. This clone can do that because first there's next to no costs like taxes and so on, and second he does it per spamming my inbox on a daily base, hence probably he sells a lot of the 'borrowed' stuff. Whether or not the multiple Sebastian Fosses are the same natural person is not my problem. I claim nothing but leave it up to you dear reader's speculation, common sense, and probability calculation.

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