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Is Optical Disk Drive Products Antitrust Litigation email legit?

This past week I have received two emails at different addresses that I use that addressed a class action lawsuit over “optical disk drives”.  The first email was dated August 24, and the second was dated August 26.  After reading through both, it seems that they are identical:

Dear Class Member:

Our records indicate that you have purchased a new computer or laptop with an internal Optical Disk Drive (ODD) or a stand-alone ODD designed for internal or external use between April 1, 2003 and December 31, 2008. You are eligible for up to $10/drive from settlements reached in antitrust litigation currently pending in Federal court. This is an estimate of the settlement amount which could increase or decrease.

ODD refers to a DVD-RW, DVD-ROM, or COMBO drive sold by a number of manufacturers including Panasonic, Sony, Hitachi-LG Data Storage, Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology, Lite-On, and Pioneer.

Submitting a claim is as easy as clicking on the link below and confirming the number of drives purchased during the settlement period.

While I was mildly curious whether the case was legit when I received the first a few days ago, I was even more curious when I looked at the second one moments ago.  Is this a legitimate email?  A phishing scam?  I recall buying a laptop during the time in question, but I have no idea whether it had an “ODD”.  The email didn’t name the federal court in which the case is pending, and that scales-303388_640seems like an important thing to leave out, but perhaps not a smoking gun.  With a payout of only $10 per drive, the email does not sound like the typical scammer who would likely be dangling a much higher dollar payout to entice victims.  Thus far, it’s really unclear one way or the other whether this email is a scam or not (I should point out that Google placed the email in my spam box, though this isn’t conclusive, either).  I know that I wasn’t the only one confused about this email.

I checked the domain name registration for the domain included in the email, and it was registered to “Sipree Devops”, a company which does advertise legal settlement marketing like this.

Next, since I don’t like clicking on links from unknown email sources, I went to Google’s cached version of the site for the claimed litigation settlement.  That site has a case number, and the name of the federal court in which the case is proceeding, and I was able to use it to find a site which has more information on the class action.  Notice the news blurb on the bottom of that site which reads, “UPDATE July 25, 2016: A judge approved a $124.5 million settlement for indirect purchasers in 23 states and the District of Columbia.”

Yes, the case seems legit

So the bottom line is that yes, this appears to be a legitimate case.  Whether you received a legit email, or one from a scammer who is capitalizing on the real deal, is another issue.  As always, be careful with what you click on.

You can check out the case for yourself: In Re: Optical Disk Drive Antitrust Litigation, Case No. 3:10-md-02143 RS (U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California).

Update – June 16, 2017

This morning, I looked in the spam folder of my Gmail account and found a new message from sender “Optical Disk Drive Antitrust News”.  A prominent blue button was near the top of the message, along with these words:

Claim Registrations Now Open
Click Below to Make Your Claim

Well, I inadvertently clicked the button, and it led me to the following url: https://opticaldiskdriveantitrust.com/#two

I then went back to the site for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to search for updates on In Re Optical Disk Drive Antitrust Litigation, but that site does not appear to allow searches for case filings (they outsource it to another site that requires registration to search).  So I then went to Leagle.com, which does not require registration.  Searching specifically for the url that was provided in the email I received – opticaldiskdriveantittrust.com – I came to a filing dated April 17, 2017.  Under Section 8(a), it states the following (my emphasis in bold):

No later than 30 days from the signing of this order for preliminary approval, the Settlement Administrators shall cause the full versions of the Settlement Agreements, the Preliminary Approval Order, and the claim form, in both an electronic fillable form and in a format that may be downloaded and/or printed, to be published on a public website, located at www.OpticalDiskDriveAntitrust.com;

So there you have it.  You can read more about the background to this case over at CNET.

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Sandra is the new face of the spammer community

If you don’t know who Sandra is, then I must admit that I don’t know who she is, either.  At least, I don’t know much about her apart from the fact that she has become the new “it” girl among spammers.  I can tell as much from the increase of spammers with the first name “Sandra” over the past few days.  There’s “Sandra Casandra”, “Sandra Olivia”, “Sandra costless”, “Sandra sandack”, and my favorite – “Sandra sandy”.

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What is going on with this?  Why the recent spurt of spam emails which use the same first name?  All of these spam messages were sexual in nature, and they presumably all wanted me to click on links within the messages.  They were sent to me at different email addresses linked to separate domains, which is a bit unusual.

Interestingly, while Sandra is the face of the spammer community over the past few days, the “it” girl last week was named Laura.

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Again, different domains received repeated spam from spammers named Laura throughout the last week of the month of May.  The content of those messages was less graphic, but the modus operandi seemed to be the same.

I did notice that the spammer sending me this junk is using PHPMailer, so just now I set up a filter to discard those messages at the server level.  I guess I’ll know in a few days if it worked.

 

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Who would fall for this ridiculous SEO spam?

Certain types of spam seems to come in waves.  Spammers will use the same text over and over again in their spammy messages while only replacing key variable information.  One of the messages that I have seen making the rounds is the one below advertising an SEO service (link and other info has been removed).

Hi I just wanted to send you a quick message here instead of calling you. I came to your —————- page and noticed you could have a lot more visitors. I have found that the key to running a popular website is making sure the visitors you are getting are interested in your subject matter. There is a company that you can get keyword targeted visitors from and they let you try the service for free for 7 days. I managed to get over 300 targeted visitors to day to my website. Check it out here: ———————

Notice the way it sounds so casual.  So courteous.  A message rather than a call?  A decision made when I have no phone number listed on the site you visited?  The bot that sends out these messages simply inserts the title of the page from the contact form into the message body.  Apparently, this is supposed to make it seem like it’s legitimate.

This spammer group has been targeting various sites of mine for a while.  Although the email above came today, I did a search of email in my inbox and found the following that I had not thrown out with the junk.  This one’s dated June 16, 2015 (underlining is mine):

Hi my name is Jacqueline and I just wanted to drop you a quick note here instead of calling you. I came to your ————- page and noticed you could have a lot more traffic. I have found that the key to running a popular website is making sure the visitors you are getting are interested in your niche. There is a company that you can get targeted visitors from and they let you try the service for free for 7 days. I managed to get over 300 targeted visitors to day to my website. Visit them here: ———
Jacqueline ——–

Interesting how over the course of the year, most of the information in this spammy message remained the same, but some parts were changed.  I underlined the parts of the earlier message that were different in the newer message.  We are told the name of the sender, Jacqueline, which matched the name of the sender in the “From” line of the email.  The newer message does not include such an introduction.  The newer message also refers to itself as “a quick message” rather than “a quick note”, and it entices us to get “a lot more visitors” rather than “a lot more traffic”.  Also, the newer message wants to help me target people who like my “subject matter”, rather than my “niche”.

internet-1027278_640So why did the spammer decide to make these changes?  Some of them are rather subtle, but I suspect that there are two reasons.  First, taking out the name of the sender from the body of the spam could make it easier to bypass junk mail filters.  Second, replacing words like “niche” with “subject matter” may be more appealing to average website owners if “niche” sounds slightly too technical.  I’m not sure if there are spammer focus groups or if spammers do market research, but the small tweaks in these messages suggest a desire to hone a message to make it more appealing and to close the deal (i.e. click on a link included with the message).

The lesson here is simple – don’t ever hire an SEO (or web designer) that you hear about through an unsolicited email.  It’s just not worth it.  If a company is willing to advertise itself through shady means to get your business, why should it be expected to promote your business through legitimate means?

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