Is UCEPROTECT running a protection racket?

19 Aug 2010

There may be a bulkmail flyer business operating out of your suburb somewhere. Assume there is, just humor me. Imagine then if a mail carrier standing in front of a mailbox in Alaska is about to deposit the Christmas card you wrote to your pal in Anchorage into your pal's mailbox. But before the mail carrier opens the mailbox, he looks at your return address and then he takes out his cellphone and calls someone who we'll call Scumbag Bob. He asks Scumbag Bob if there has ever been a report of junkmail originating from your zipcode. Turns out there has been. In fact, Scumbag Bob tells him, your zipcode is a source of lots of junkmail because remember you've got a junkmail business down the road from you. The mail carrier then refuses to deliver your postcard to your pal, instead he returns it to you with a note to contact Scumbag Bob.

All is not lost though! You can easily fix the situation. You can complain to your city council. Once they have had some meetings, eaten some donuts, maybe had a few fist fights and finally closed down all junkmail businesses in your zipcode, they can then talk to Scumbag Bob and get your zipcode removed from his list. Then your cookie recipes will be zipping around the world again.

OR... If YOU PAY Scumbag Bob $20/month, he will remember to tell mail carriers that even though your zipcode is a known source of junkmail, they should allow your (and only yours) letters through because you are a decent enough fellow.

Of course everyone knows that a scam like this would never fly. First of all, why should your entire zipcode suffer because of the junkmail business down the road from you? Secondly, no self respecting mail carrier would subscribe to that kind of service, right? And thirdly, Scumbag Bob would be put out of business because it's just a ridiculous (and borderline illegal) idea anyway.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Scumbag Bob. He is known as UCEPROTECT-network and he sells his services as whitelisted.org.

Here is UCEPROTECT trying to get me to pay them $18/month to whitelist my own specific IPs because they have blacklisted my entire ISP. That's every IP address at my entire datacenter apparently.

Based on the above, I have to urge reasonable email server administrators to NOT subscribe to UCEPROTECT Level-3, which seems like a massive scam to me.

My ISP reports endless problems trying to get removed from this UCEPROTECT RBL. In fact, given the shady extortion fee system they have going here, I suspect UCEPROTECT are in the business of keeping innocent bystander IPs on their blacklists, and getting paid to remove them.