Ax E-mails From Infoaxe And Shoppybag

GazeboNews has been receiving suspicious e-mails. One was allegedly sent by a Lake Forest reader...but it really wasn't from a Lake Forest reader. It was spam from an operation called Infoaxe. The subject line of the e-mail said: "So-and-so sent you a private message from Infoaxe--please respond." Delete this e-mail. According to our reader, if you click on the yes button your entire address book will be harvested and the next round of messages will go out to your friends with your name on it. We also got an e-mail from a friend allegedly associated with "shoppybag," which sounds iffy. Suspicious-looking e-mails are like sour milk: When in doubt, throw it out. 

Comments

[Erum Ahmadani]

I got one e-mail like that came from one of my ex(s). I didn't open it as wasn't sure that I want to talk to him again. I wanted to find out why he sent this message through this Infoaxe which is just a search engine! After googling for a while find this article so now I know it was just a stupid spam!!:P

[Jonathan]

Hi,
This is Jonathan, co-founder of Infoaxe. I wanted to provide some additional information to help clarify some of the concerns.

Infoaxe helps users do 2 things,
1. Help users keep track of webpages visited across computers and browsers so that you will never forget a page again. You no longer have to worry about bookmarking a page anymore! All pages you visit are automatically bookmarked & made searchable. You can view a page in Internet explorer at work and find it in firefox from your home computer. This is private and protected by a userid and password. Think of it as your very own private Bookcase for the Web where you have access to a copy of every page that you ever saw on the Web. The Jerusalem Post has a descriptive review here, http://tinyurl.com/963oeg citing some of the main benefits of having a search engine for your web memory.
You can also find more information on our blog http://infoaxe.wordpress.com/2008/11/19/infoaxe-your-personal-web-memory-no-more-bookmarking/

2. Share webpages that you like, with friends in a convenient & fun way. You choose what to share and who to share it with. You can also subscribe to your friends to see what pages they are sharing. (Similar in some ways to Twitter & Facebook). You can read more about this on our blog http://infoaxe.wordpress.com/2009/06/19/feedshare-what-are-my-friends-reading-today/

Our users derive a lot of value by inviting their friends to use the service, since this makes the service more fun for them. More friends using the service implies that more webpages are shared by friends which is more fun and helps you stay connected with people you care about. Of course as with all social services (be it facebook,myspace,twitter,linkedin etc), sometimes the friend sentiment might not be reciprocated which makes the invitation useless at best and annoying at worst (as in this case).

We are strongly committed to the privacy of our users (http://infoaxe.com/privacy.html) and take steps to ensure that a user cannot abuse the system by inviting people he/she is not really friends with in real life since we want to reinforce real world connections. We will be adding more checks to ensure that users are not allowed to accidentally invite people that they are not really friends with.

I hope this helps clarify things.

thanks
Jonathan

[Jane Smith]

I've had emails coming from the following address : Sara Petersen They've been e-mailing me for two days now, requesting that I 'be her friend'. I do not have any connection with her whatsoever, and have been 'trashing' her e-mails to me. This is completely unsolicited contact, and I have no idea who she is.
I also stumbled across this forum while trying to find out more about this 'spam-mail'. Jonathon, As co-founder of Infoaxe, you may want to investigate this particular party.
Regards

[Jonathan]

Thanks for bringing this to my attention, Jane. We will be sure to investigate and suspend the account in question if necessary.

Can you email support@infoaxe.com with the emailid at which Sara's invites are reaching you?

[Blanche]

ATTENTION ATTENTION: IT'S A TOTAL SCAM.

Dear Jonathan (co-founder of Infoaxe who is listed above):

YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELF.
Your web tactics are illegal and you are stealing peoples' address books. Your site is a total scam. I have had two emails only today from people who are now working full-time to contact their entire address books because your SPAM SCAM emails faked them out and then you illegally stole the contents of their address books.

I hope people do what I do and google you and end up on little sites like this one (THANK YOU TO THIS SITE) and learn, as I did, that you are being this awful.

But the fact that you would have written this here just makes it all worse. Trying to portray your company as legitimate and above-board. You even have a PRIVACY statement here that is the height of, well, crap. To claim that you "are strongly committed to the privacy" of your users! Really. Do you sleep well at night?

ATTENTION ALL:
It's a total scam to steal your Address Book. Beware.

[Niall]

It's a scam for sure, fortunately I used a disposable email address to look into it ... not the first time a site has offered to 'find my friends' but even less honest than Facebook (both the yes and no buttons in the email do the same thing, confirm your email address then attempt to steal your address book).

Particularly tricky is the use of a familiar name as a front, just remember that if your friend already has your email they can just use it directly !

[InfoAxe Is Trash]

InfoAxe has been sending emails to people and spoofing the from address so it appears to be coming from my companies' address.

So not only are they spamming people but wasting my time and money having to reply to pissed off people who are threatening to take action against me for spamming them.

I've already contacted InfoAxe's web host, domain name registrar and will soon be contacting the upline data providers for their web host. Usually a company like this is using a web host that won't care so going up the line to the companies that provide bandwidth to them is the best approach.

[Victim]

Infoaxe is still doing harm.

I send many application for employment via email (50+) and unfortunately Infoaxe send their message under my name too. This will not make a good impression for any employer and I hope this people will be stopped stealing email-addresses and sending messages in the name of their victims. If they would have their head office in my country (Germany), I would have make a complaint to stop this criminal doing by law...

[IT John]

Jonathan is a COMPLETE liar. You only have to look at the giant red buttons called YES and NO. They have almost exactly same links. So it matters not which one you press. Just because a button is LABELED "NO" doesnt mean that is what it does. NEVER click on links from unsolicited emails. (And check with the sender before you click on links from know email senders)

[C]

This is VERY upsetting. My elderly mother and I do keep in touch thru email. She called me and was wanting to know why I sent her this "email" telling her that if she did not click yes that I was going to think she no longer wanted emails from me. This is ABUSE and should be punishable !!! I am ashamed of it all. It took me a long time to explain how many cruel bullies there are out there in the "web world" and I had to assure her the email did NOT come from me... and yet it has every appearance it did come from me... infoaxe.net SHAME SHAME SHAME go pick on the members of your own family and leave mine alone !! Get the F'k out of our lives and go get a life of your own !!

[C]

hummm that is odd I typed www.infoaxe.net in the address bar and "page not found" came up ??? geeeee whats wrong infoaxe ?? getting to many compaints??

[Maralee]

ok, you got me...now how do I get rid of you? I can't find a place to delete this infoaxe....I have much better things to do than deal with immature, amateur ignoramuses....like maybe making this world a better place....