Got a text spam today. Decided to try to tack them down. This is the spam:

Last 1 hr Left to Activate Your 70% Off Custom Animated Video Deal. Click Here http://eel.nu/5Z0l/t9MTE to Activate Now & Grow Your Sales by 1000%. Reply STOPRM to Remove

I sent the link to my computer by forwarding the text message to my email account and tracked it to 29designs.us. Did a whois lookup on them and found the perp.

Domain Name: 29DESIGNS.US
Domain ID: D58740175-US
Sponsoring Registrar: eNom, Inc.
Sponsoring Registrar IANA ID: 48
Registrar URL (registration services): whois.enom.com
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited
Registrant ID: B22AA2A214547A8E
Registrant Name: Mildred Smith
Registrant Organization: Mikro Designs
Registrant Address1: 2176 White Avenue
Registrant City: Corpus Christi
Registrant State/Province: TX
Registrant Postal Code: 78476
Registrant Country: United States
Registrant Country Code: US
Registrant Phone Number: +1.2813783479
Registrant Email: mildredsmith277@gmail.com

I wonder if exposing them will make them want to stop? Suggestions?



  1. Number Please says:

    Mildred will probably call you back around 2 am.

  2. Ah_Yea says:

    I would like to know how Mildred got your number. Is your cell service selling your information? Maybe robotexting?

  3. Keep Up The Good Work says:

    Well Perkel, with your last three posts I think you’ve created Fido and Bobbo repellent!

    (unless they’re on Spring Break in some “no internet allowed” private resort.)

    • Hmeyers says:

      The real problem with Trump from a partisan Democrat standpoint is that Trump acquired the best pieces of Bernie Sander’s platform.

      1) Fix NAFTA
      2) Gun rights (Bernie was pro-2nd amendment)
      3) Curtail illegal immigration because it suppresses wages, especially for those without college degrees.
      4) I hope Trump keeps his promise on H1B visas, I think it is on the backburner but hope it will happen.

      Partisan Democrats are Democrats without concern for any specific issues and only bring anger to the table.

      Trump also exposes the Republicans, because Trump isn’t aligned with any of the what the Republican platform is supposed to be (Free trade? No. Against entitlements? No. Against gay marriage? Condoms? No.)

      Democrat rage against Trump is because he took the issues that Democrats talk about and are supposed to do something about and made them his own like NAFTA.

      So the Republicans are co-opted. And the Democrats have a big fat nothing-burger for a platform.

      • David K. says:

        I came to the site from my RSS reader to see if this topic would get threadjacked towards Trump. Was not disappointed. Well, yes, I’m disappointed, but I’m not surprised.

      • NewFormatSux says:

        Did he really make a promise on H1Bs? It won’t matter because they are going to give green cards for STEM degrees. You have the same increase in job seekers, only this time they can go from company to company.

  4. Hmeyers says:

    “I wonder if exposing them will make them want to stop? Suggestions?”

    Doesn’t seem likely unless you involve the Better Business Bureau or something to that effect.

    If they are making money doing it, they will continue doing it you would think unless possible legal action is breathing down their neck.

  5. bobbo, the truth has a liberal bias says:

    I took my hotmail account off my smart phone. Saves Batteries. Home and work computer for email. Phone is for “me.”

    • What About Bobbo? says:

      Do you not know the difference between an email and a text?

      • Oh No Bobbo! says:

        And can _you_ tell the difference???

        Here is what we need to fix spam: Get the spammer to reply to you with another text message and then shooting their text messages at another spammer.

        With either scripting on a rooted Android phone, or with an on-line SMS account and a general disregard for the ToS for either (maybe a good use for a disposable SIM card and that old Moto in the back of your nightstand–nice phone, but do you really need to hang onto every 3G phone that didn’t tall apart before your contract was up???)

        Positive feed back loops 101:

        A few (OK, it was twenty) years ago I decided I was fed up with the IT admin people who were generally trolls of the worst kind (military facility–they were not the type with a lot of imagination). One of them walked away from the computer they were logged into without logging out, so I decided that it was time to have some fun–and this is the key part, since you need to have two spammers lined up at just the right time.

        The trick was to put in a very “special” auto-reply rule into the offensive IT admin’s Outlook which simply sent an automatic reply to any email which had a specific phrase in it which forwarded it to a mailing list which the IT admin, and my officer in charge were on. My senior officer was both an easy target and a deserving target as well. So an identical rule, with a list that had the IT admin on it, as well as themselves. One of Outlook’s “features” was this ability to create our own personal spam lists. Wait until Friday afternoon and send off some innocent email to one or the other and when they return on Monday the IT admin is trying to figure out why they crashed the email server and blaming my boss.

        All you need to do is get the right two spammers–those who might be pulling a scam, or otherwise would want to follow up, by text. Hopefully, also sell your info to more spammers. Then you just need to get the spammers to start pointing at each other. SMS equiv. of an auto-forward. Any on-line SMS account would have the potential to incur a lot of messages, and either cost or wrath of admin, should you do something mischievous like start auto-forwarding spam to other spammers. Once you reply to a spammer, you are advertising yourself a willing victim, and they do sell off lists of active chumps.

        Not sure it would really do that much, but it gave me a chance to relive a prank which had two people I really did not care for sniping at each other and otherwise making each other miserable rather than the rest of us for almost a week.

  6. bobbo, the truth has a liberal bias says:

    Mildred Smith?

    I just noticed and made me laugh. I vision a kiddie in the basement (Ok…not all that likely in Corpus Christy…. lets go with the attic?) throwing his mom or g-maw under the bus should the feds ever come looking. Smith is usually an alias though. Now, I wonder just how imaginative the kiddie is.

  7. endigo says:

    Spammers buy dozens of domains every day. Mildred (if that is the correct name) is just the name and address used by the spammers that day. The best way to verify this is that the domain was probably registered with 72 hours of you receiving the spam.

  8. Bored at Home says:

    Here’s a little “spam” for you left leaning lunatics:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiVQ8vrGA_8

    … Truth hurts. Deal with it.

  9. Corpus Native says:

    I’m from Corpus and there is no such address in the city.

  10. SquallMano says:

    Can you feed them their own number so that they end up spamming themselves somehow?

  11. af says:

    I’m just taking an hour off first and going into their website:
    They have a chat system that has an UPLOAD button. It accepts up to 50MB. start uploading s*** to their server.
    I uploaded like 1/2 Gig until they found out and cut me out.
    Download TOR browser, change your identity, and keep going until they block you.
    also, the form does not have a char limit so copy /paste the bible or some other long thing on txt format.
    repeat twice every hour or more.

    just to annoy them

  12. Zero says:

    I knew (personally) the guy the FBI publicly blamed for the Melissa virus. Front page news. Lovely how the retraction was page C7.

  13. Michelle says:

    I go the same text. Investigating…

  14. Michelle says:

    The whois registrant information is fake (for example the address does not exist). I reported it to registar (enom) using this form: http://www.enom.com/help/abusepolicy.aspx (I hope you do the same, it takes less than a minute).


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