VerticalScope Inc
reviews and complaints

Selling personal data to spammers?

Well-evidenced complaint about being spammed got me BANNED!

I recently signed up for an account at a popular sea fishing forum run by this company.

I opened a thread asking for advice on fishing rods, and got some excellent advice from some helpful members. I also asked for advice about boat fishing and got some even more excellent advice there.

Unfortunately a short while after signing up for the account I received two spam emails, pretty low grade stuff (I have cancer please send money..). Boy how I detest spam. For that reason I use a spam protection email service which helps me in my enjoyable little hobby of ’catching’ companies who abuse personal data or send spam, and doing that helps me prove it to them when necessary too. It leaves no ‘wiggle room’.

How it works is I create a new email for every single online account I create, same for high street stores who ask for email address. Simply put, I have the @ part of the domain, so I receive any email (forwarded to my real personal email) which is sent to ANYTHING @ xxxxxx.xxxxx.com. (the ANYTHING part is made up on the fly for each new account).

This means if I give CompanyX an email address, they have one which nobody else has, and when I receive email I can see which address it was sent TO, which tells me where it came FROM.

When signing up at this forum I did as I always do and used [protected]@xxxx.xxxx.com. That way, the ONLY time that email address has ever been used, is for that ONE and only account. The only people who have ever been given it, is this particular forum owned by Vertical Scope Inc.

So, I wasn’t too happy about this spam, especially when I could see it came from someone at this particular forum, or someone who got it from them somehow.

I opened a thread to ask for this to be investigated. The defensive stuff ensued, even though my complaint was 100% polite and professional, but the moderator somewhat curtly asked the admin to investigate and told me ‘someone will get back to you after a deeper dive’. I had explained the evidence so I assumed they’d surely have to investigate, and was pleased to see them say they were doing so.

2.5 months later, not a bean. No response at all. I posted on the thread again to ask what was going on and why hadn’t anyone got back to me. From there I was met with insults, harassment, and illogical statements from the moderator like “this has never happened before”. In short they were suggesting I was lying, yet the evidence made that a fairly silly claim. One user however chipped in to support me saying he was very interested in seeing this investigated also.

Finally, after other members were permitted to continue goading, baiting and trolling me, calling me a scammer trying to bring down a ‘good forum’, and finally calling me a four letter C word, the thread was locked. (More to prevent my continued responses than for the abuse I received, I am fairly sure of that).

The forum’s published rules state that swearing, insulting/abusing/harassing etc are all disallowed, yet nothing seemed to happen about it. The person who called me the C word then sent me a private message calling me an idiot etc. More abuse.

I received a message from the moderator (Nick Philips) stating he had locked the thread, along with the comment:

“Hi, Plenty of experience at running this site for a long long time, and with the full backing of a hundreds of millions of dollars owner. The thread was locked to stop it being hijacked, the forum owners in Canada/USA are looking into it. Nick”

I was astounded by the “millions of dollars” comment, another defensive (or perhaps veiled threat) comment. I replied to say my complaint was genuine and I didn’t appreciate the harassment and insults, and asking why the forum rules weren’t being enforced. He didn’t respond to that but replied to say ‘alarm bells are going off about your reason for being here’.

Clearly it’s easier to find some imaginary boogie man, than look into what is actually a breach of the law, and of my legally protected data subject rights.

I just wanted this looked into for the benefit of all, including that of the forum as the penalties are severe for this stuff here in the UK (it’s an area I have experience in). I could have just gone straight to the ICO (ico.org.uk) with my report and evidence. You can bet your bottom dollar I will now.

I replied, again completely politely, to say that I was entirely genuine, I had threads showing my ‘reasons for being here’, but clearly reasons were being sought to ban me rather than do what was promised and investigate the very real spam I received.

Next thing I get an email saying my account has been BANNED?! The email reads:

“Your account has been banned for the following reason: Not here for the right reasons and troublemaking.”

What a disgusting way to behave. Every single part of my complaint was 100% genuine and honest. I have the emails with server details and long headers etc to prove their transit through the internet. Nobody wanted to see any of that. They just wanted me gone. Does vertical scope consider it ‘troublemaking’ when someone catches them out illegally spamming users?

The thing is, I didn’t directly accuse them of that and even gave them ‘outs’, such as their hosting company could have a rogue employee abusing data on servers, or a forum member may have obtained moderation level access, and so on. Hence why I expected ALL parties to be interested in finding the source of the leak. But no. Banned.

Well thanks. You motivated me to write this, and to make a formal complaint to the ICO and Trading Standards (and anyone else I can think of). Well done. You could have just investigated and told me “we can’t find how it happened but sorry and we will try to ensure it doesn’t happen again”, and I would have said thanks very much and carried on my enjoyment of, and contributing to, their popular fishing forum.

Ho hum. There’s other forums, and most in my experience take this sort of stuff very seriously, just as they should.

Cartownforums.com buyer’s forum in terms of use stated they would refund if money was lost. I sent them an activation code for an item for $290. After 5 emails, after code was sent they sent, I got an email stating that my order was being processed. I sent them 5 emails after and of course got no response. I sent the administrator a complaint email to no avail. Please avoid this online company!