Spammer exploits vBulletin vulnerability, GoDaddy tries to extort $75 from me

[nunbeater]

Holy shit what a genius business plan. Sell software with exploit in it. Charge people when other people use that exploit. PROFIT

The exploit was not GoDaddy's fault. That was vBulletin's fault, and I didn't buy vBulletin from GoDaddy.

But the $75 charge was offensive given that I was fully cooperating and their blanket policy is just to judge you guilty and charge you regardless of what you say.

Ah I got you. Still pretty lame of them.

In Druff's defense GoDaddy wasn't always completely horrible. I wouldn't host with them anymore but registering your sites and shit, sure, shouldn't be a problem. Although I would definitely use a different company now.

[4Dragons]

insta-move all of your domains off of godaddy. other registrars will do that shit for free. Fuck godaddy, fuck them up their stupid asses.

[abrown83]

I don't understand the hate for GoDaddy.

They aren't anywhere near the same level as EC2 but as far as usability and customer service (this issue withstanding) they are far superior to almost every other provider.

Nothing worse than dealing with some person from India who literally knows nothing.

They also pay and treat their staff well.


Yes they are on the wrong side of the Net Neutrality issue but other than that I have no hate for them.

We spend about a 100k a year with them at my business and they let us decide what data centers we want our servers in, and we have a dedicated account rep who takes care of problems. Also I have never had a support ticket take more than an hour to resolve.

[Dan Druff]

My response:

Hello,

As promised during my phone call on 1/18/2014, I tracked down the source of the spam.

The spam was occurring due to an exploit in the vBulletin forum/blog software, where users can "e-mail a blog to a friend", and thus use that feature to spam anyone using any server running vBulletin blog software.

There is no feature in vBulletin to turn this feature off.

I have manually gone into the vBulletin software and disabled that feature, so this exploit no longer exists.

Now that I have closed this loophole, there will not be any further spam from pokerfraudalert.com. I was not guilty of the spamming myself, and was a victim of hackers using this exploit. The problem is solved and will not recur.

-Todd Witteles

Their answer:

Dear Sir or Madam, The complaint volume, at this time, is not enough to cause a major concern and this, coupled with your explanation of the situation is reason enough for GoDaddy to consider this matter closed. Thank you for your cooperation.

Regards,
Domain Name Abuse

[Dan Druff]

BUMP

I decided to put in a complaint about this.

The main customer service department was useless (they took a lot of my time listening to the story, only to tell me they were simply referring it to the abuse department!)

I then called the abuse department myself and complained to a manager.

The manager agreed that there were "two lapses in judgment" in how this was handled:

1) They should not have jumped to the $75 penalty and promise not to spam when it appeared I was cooperating and likely innocent.

2) The person I spoke to on the phone should not have questioned how sick I was, and in fact my request for a week to resolve the matter was reasonable.

About two days after I made this complaint, I received notice that I received 3 years free of pokerfraudalert.com registration, which sounds great, but in reality is only worth between $30-$45, depending upon what coupon you have. Anyway, I'm satisfied with this resolution, though honestly I wish it was just handled properly in the first place.

[simpdog]

BUMP

I decided to put in a complaint about this.

The main customer service department was useless (they took a lot of my time listening to the story, only to tell me they were simply referring it to the abuse department!)

I then called the abuse department myself and complained to a manager.

The manager agreed that there were "two lapses in judgment" in how this was handled:

1) They should not have jumped to the $75 penalty and promise not to spam when it appeared I was cooperating and likely innocent.

2) The person I spoke to on the phone should not have questioned how sick I was, and in fact my request for a week to resolve the matter was reasonable.

About two days after I made this complaint, I received notice that I received 3 years free of pokerfraudalert.com registration, which sounds great, but in reality is only worth between $30-$45, depending upon what coupon you have. Anyway, I'm satisfied with this resolution, though honestly I wish it was just handled properly in the first place.

Nice resolution.

$30-45 should go into the tourney fund now!

[BCR]

Druff, you missed your calling. You should add some diploma mill law degree to your resume and open a consumer advocacy contingency-based private law firm. And that's not a cheap Jew joke. It's a compliment. I have probably left $200k on the table throughout the course of my life that I would have been happy to give you a 1/3 of because I didn't want to deal with a bunch of shit. You hate seeing people get screwed, and making money while fighting bad customer service or straight scams might not even feel like work to you.


I apologize if this is a repetitive post. I know I've thought this after reading many of your posts before, but I don't think I've ever commented on it.

[bottomset_69]

My response:




Their answer:

Dear Sir or Madam, The complaint volume, at this time, is not enough to cause a major concern and this, coupled with your explanation of the situation is reason enough for GoDaddy to consider this matter closed. Thank you for your cooperation.

Regards,
Domain Name Abuse

Good move. Hard to believe there are people hacking blogs to spam. Seriously, hacking blogs on a poker site to spam users. Unreal.