Hello All,
We had to create an account so we can response to this post and provide our side of story.
Being new to this community let me first introduce our offering.
We are a seo hosting provider that provides IPs from 120+ different datacenters from all around the world all managed from a single whm account.
That is very true that traditional seo hosting companies have a single computer behind a single router with many ip addresses but what we offer is ips from all around the world and not just a single datacenter or single server.
We are very glad to be a part of this community as many of highly respected domain traders are our very good and loyal customers and notified us of this post.
Now back to this case!
Due to the nature of our business and huge ip space we have, unfortunately we are a target of email spammers. There is not a day that goes by that we do not have few spammers signing up on our site (mostly from Russia but from time to time we get 1 or 2 from USA too) that we have to manually verify and reject to protect our ip space reputation and stay within the boundaries of law.
As you will see this particular order has all the signs of an email spammer which we needed to verify.
This customers ordered 30 different IPs from 30 different datacenters and all from different states in the US. This by itself is not a flag as all our clients order from different datacenters.
The first red flag was the order, as you can see in the stripe screenshot the first payment was rejected by the issuing bank as fraud/stolen card, 6 minutes later using a different credit card the order was paid.
The order was then automatically approved after the payment and all 30 ips were assigned to his account.
The second red flag was the main domain name of the order "subscribernexus.com" which as you can see is less than 2 months old and sounds very much like a mailing list. To put this in perspective, almost all our clients have expensive and aged domains and not just random domain names.
The 3rd red flag was the ticket he opened and asked for smtp port and exim configuration on all those 30 domains to be changed so he can send mass emails. He also asked for PTR for all does ips to be changed as according to him, gmail might block his email. Again seo experts looking to host their PBN do not ask or need any of those and unless someone is after a mass mailing solution none of these applies.
At this point and in order for us to be able to change PTR of that many ips and by so many different providers, we needed to verify his identity. This is a safeguard and legal responsibility. This is a very standard process (check mailgun mandrilapp and so on)
As you can see in the screenshot all we asked was for him to verify his identity and business purpose before we can open 30 different datacenters to this unknown individual.
For probably obvious reason he did not want to verify his identity meanwhile we got an email from one of the datacenters notifying us that one of the ips is now blocked because of spam activities.
This is all despite the fact that as you can see after we got the spam alert from the datacenter we refunded his payment.
This is a mater of illegal activities on rented space, potential identity or credit card theft which ended with attacks on our companies reputation.
We have forwarded this to our legal agent as I am sure any one would do to protect their business and customers.
At the end of the day we will do anything in our power to make sure our ip space remains clean and no spammer ends up using any of our ips.
As many of you already know and considering the value of domains that are hosted on our networks we are very picky when it comes to accept new customers.
As always our main goal is to keep our existing client base and help them grow their network and protect their domains rather than focusing on accepting risky clients.
Regards,
Smart SEO Hosting.
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