Here to help us find out is one npseo.com. These idiots sent me a spam this morning. Here are the contents:

Dear Website Owner,

If I could get you five times the RELEVANT traffic at a substantially reduced cost would you be interested? National Positions can place your website on top of the Natural Listings on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Our Search Engine Optimization team delivers more top rankings than anyone else and we can prove it. We do not use "link farms" or "black hat" methods that Google and the other search engines frown upon and can use to de-list or ban your site. The techniques are proprietary, involving some valuable closely held trade secrets. Our prices are less than half of what other companies charge.

I would be happy to send you a proposal using the top search phrases for your area of expertise. Please contact me at your convenience so I can start saving you some money. Please do not hesitate to email or call me if you would like further information.

Sincerely,
Ron Carvel
Executive Vice President

National Positions
26500 W. Agoura Road
Suite 102-547
Calabasas, California 91302

Phone – 866-669-8789
Toll Free – 866.446.2885

Profitable Internet Marketing

I'm seeing several things here:

1. They are clearly scraping WHOIS data (in violation of ICANN rules)
2. They are spammers
3. Apparently their "valuable closely held trade secrets" amount to sending spam.

To add insult to injury, these goat-felchers are using a private registration through another set of fellow animal-lovers who go by the name PrivacyProtect.org. That's right. These scum don't want their fellow scum to scrape WHOIS and spam them with offers of SEO. But who can blame them? I mean really, who wants to get a fresh pile of bullshit from some former door-to-door types who hired a couple minimum-wage high-school VB hacks to scrape contact info from WHOIS? Apparently NO ONE. This must be what they mean by "Profitable Internet Marketing".

This is, of course, the event that triggered my anti-private-registration rant earlier.

Well, I'm continuing to complain to privacyprotect.org (who so far sees "no evidence of abuse" - I can only assume due to a pair of horse balls obscuring their vision) and I've also filed a complaint with ICANN. Not that they ever do anything but avoid useful work, but hey, we all have to do our part.

UPDATE PrivacyProtect.org has notified me that after requesting two copies of the original email from me (their email copier is apparently broked), they agree that a violation has occurred. This is, of course, a huge victory for all of mankind, or at the very least, some of SE Portland, the concentration of victory being densest around my keyboard. Anyway, I'm curious to see what they actually do about it.

UPDATE PrivacyProtect.org has apparently unmasked them =) WHOIS now shows the registrant of npseo.com as:

Registrant:
   RoyalTechNet
   Deepak Bansal        (sales@royaltechnet.com)
   A-3, Shree Balaji C.G.H.S.
   Sector-6, Plot # 37, Dwarka
   Delhi
   Delhi,110045
   IN
   Tel. +91.9416075968

Creation Date: 13-Sep-2007
Expiration Date: 13-Sep-2008

Domain servers in listed order:
   ns4.rover-host.com
   ns3.rover-host.com

I'm actually fairly impressed that PrivacyProtect.org took action in a reasonable time frame, all animal-loving aside. Go PETA.

Still, lest all seem swimmingly georgeous, WHOIS also reveals the following:

$ whois royaltechnet.com
Registrant:
   PrivacyProtect.org
   Domain Admin        (contact@privacyprotect.org)
   P.O. Box 97
   All Postal Mails Rejected, visit Privacyprotect.org
   Moergestel
   null,5066 ZH
   NL
   Tel. +45.36946676

Creation Date: 10-Jun-2002
Expiration Date: 10-Jun-2008

Domain servers in listed order:
   ns2.messagecontact.com
   ns1.messagecontact.com

Sigh. Private registrations remain evil.

[UPDATE (the victory)] Today I was cleaning up some blog spam and decided to check the status of npseo.com once more. Here's what I now get:

[whois.PublicDomainRegistry.com]
Domain Name: NPSEO.COM

Registrant:
    Directi False Whois Suspended Account
    Directi False Whois Suspended Account (inaccuratewhois@suspended-domain.com)
    This Domain is Suspended
    Due to inaccurate Whois
    Contact Support Desk
    null,00000,0000
    US
    Tel. +00.0000

Woohoo. One small victory =)