Sloan Marketing: They Try to Look Legitimate

I've been spammed by Sloan Marketing and their affiliates since June 2003. They try really hard to look like a legitimate marketing company, but I have no doubt that they're just another spammer. For example, go to their website and try their nifty "Live Help". Ask the live correspondent for a phone number to be removed from their lists. You'll likely get 800-882-4312. Try it, it's a voicemail system. Leave a message, if you like, but it will have no effect.

Here is one of their earlier spams; it suggests to me that they're in the spam business. Looks like they mistakenly left the reference to Sloan Marketing in the From: header.

Their FAQ has a question that asks if they sell contact lists. The FAQ does not answer that question! It does say that "SloanMarketing is a strong supporter of responsible email use and permission-based email marketing". I know that to be simply false. I've got a nice collection of evidence that shows that they have ignored my revocation of permission to send me marketing email. Furthermore, I never granted them that permission in the first place; so much for "permission-based email".

Sloan Marketing doesn't comply with California's anti-spam law, even though they do business in California (1819 Polk St., #292, San Franciso, CA 94109, and formerly 1288 Columbus Ave, #114, San Francisco, CA 94114). I got that address in spam from eBizChannel as well as directly from Eric Stevens at +1 415-240-4066, who was allegedly acting as a "Client Services Consultant" of Sloan Marketing. I got that phone number, +1 415-240-4066, from Sloan Marketing's Live Help.

TOASTEDspam has lots of hits on Sloan Marketing.

Here are some alleged names of representatives of Sloan Marketing and their affiliates:

They have used the following SMTP servers: Possible affiliate or related domains and identities include, with current domain registrar listed in brackets: In addition to the phone numbers mentioned above, they have also used 800-588-8615. That number is used by both Sales Universe (see below) and Email Appenders. Sales Universe uses an address of 2370 Market Street # 174, San Francisco, CA 94114.

All was quiet for a while. Then on 17 August 2004, I received a spam with a suspicious address: Member Preference Dept, 1288 Columbus Ave, #114, San Francisco, CA 94113. The phone number was 800-882-4312. Links in the message were to maili0.com and surveyregister.com.

The current whois information for surveyregister.com shows the same administrative, billing, contact, and registrant phone number as that of sloanmarketing.com. http://www.surveyregister.com immediately redirects to http://www.maila1.com, which has the identical address and phone number as sloanmarketing.com.

maili0.com has an incomplete phone number in their whois info.

I called the sender of this last spam, and they said that they hired salesuniverse.com for this marketing campaign. salesuniverse.com has a very slick website, and even a web page that has their opinions on the CAN-Spam act. This website supports live help, which seems common to others referenced in this thread. It also mentions that they're headquartered in San Francisco. A bit of searching for salesuniverse.com turned up another interesting connection: it mentions alans@salesuniverse.com. Could the "S" stand for "Stewart"? And it also mentions that the spammer sent mail to an address that did not opt in.

Yes, the "S" stand for "Stewart": Alan Stewart associated his name and email address here. And 6figurechampions is mentioned as well. (That page no longer shows those associations. It used to.)

salesuniverse.biz appears to be the same company as salesuniverse.com: the web sites look the same.

And the web keeps growing: the 6figurechampions listing is from Chris Harris, chrish@6figurechampions. An old Salesuniverse page had a quote from Chris Harris of Recuriting [sic] Junction. That completes one cycle: Recruiting Junction first spammed me back in June 2003.

22 December 2004: I got yet another spam from Sales Universe. This one again states:

You are receiving this mail because you either subscribed at one of our websites or you subscribed with a third party. We sincerely hope you enjoyed receiving this mailing, but if you received it in error, and if you don't wish to receive any further messages from us please follow the link and you will be automatically excluded from any future mailings.

That's completely false, of course. The message pulls images from www.databrowser.com, for what that's worth.

25 January 2005: And yet another spam. This time, it's for eventgain.net .

07 February 2005: And yet another one. It's from sixchannels.net .

Both eventgain.net and sixchannels.net list Irish Domains for all of their Whois contacts. The domain registrar for both is register.com .

Spring 2005: datachampions.net has been spamming me this Spring.

December 2007: the spam from Sloan Marketing and affiliates comes and goes. It has been quiet for a while.

September 2008: and then another one, from listgalaxy.net. It has 800-870-3107 for Josh Pearson's phone number. A Google search on that number shows a bunch of hits that mention Sloan Marketing. The spam has a couple of links to tracking.leadcentral.us pages, including the unsubscribe link. Another new affiliation is the SMTP server that originated the message: mta1.trustesender.com [64.22.75.213]. The whois information for trustesender.com includes the registrar99@hotmail.com email address common to many of the other domains mentioned above.

Check out this Toasted Spam article.

David Levine
Last modified: Mon Feb 7 07:05:48 CST 2005