IT@Cork

Monster steals email addresses and spams it@cork membership

This morning one of it@cork‘s members forwarded us an email conversation he had with John Burns, Monster‘s Business Development Manager in Ireland. We were incredulous when we read it.

It started with an email from Monster’s John Burns to 189 recipients and CC’d to our member (!). Our member replied to John that this was spam and

…coming from Monster, most unprofessional. Worse, you exposed everyone’s email address to one another without their permission

Unbelievably for someone working in an online organisation, Monster’s John Burns seems to be unaware of the data protection legislation and responded to this saying:

These email addresses are part of a networking list from http://www.itcork.ie and are all available for everyone to see.

I do appreciate your concern chris, (i will keep my eye out for the bloggers!!!)

The legislation surrounding this kind of behaviour is very clear, data can only be used for the purposes for which it is obtained. We in it@cork were obviously naive in publishing the members directory (since taken offline) but that doesn’t confer on anyone permission to harvest that address list and spam them.

The Irish Data protection Commissioner takes a very dim view of this and has the power to levy fines of up to €3,000 per address spammed (so potentially €570,000 in this case).

it@cork is a not-for-profit, IT professionals networking organisation, based in Cork. I am on the steering committee of it@cork, helping out with the running as much as I can in a voluntary capacity.

18 thoughts on “Monster steals email addresses and spams it@cork membership”

  1. What’s the deal with everyone spamming this Monday?

    A nice big whopping fine for some spamming organisation and a whole lot of bad publicity might make people think twice before doing this.

    Very, very annoying.

    Perhaps this issue should be escalated to some of Mt Burns’ US counterparts?

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  3. Ach I came by here to see if there were anymore comments from Pedro, its giving me a right laugh this Tuesday morning. But alas, he hasn’t commented here, yet…

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  7. And while we’re at it – has anyone else been spammed by the Golden Spiders recently? I have. And over on Michele’s blog Tom mentioned that too.

    If the Data Commissioners are going to act and do anything, they should be catching all the nasty spamming criminals!

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  18. Was there any follow up on this ?

    I think recruiters , especially the big ones get a bad rap for various reasons. The only thing with Ireland is that because it’s such a small place, you can’t get away with too much.

    Paul
    http://www.eirjobs.com/

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