Questionable Blocks

[RaidForums]

So it has come to my attention that "Spam404" aka Cameron Dawe been blocking questionable content, among this my forum but I'm not even going to mention that because it's up to his personal decision of what to block on his list but I think the main reason I am making this "Issue Report" that will just get swept under the rug is because many companies and individuals trust you to keep a unbiased factual list which blocks scams and spam. An example was YouTube in 2014 how they trusted "Spam404" to the point of deleting user accounts that you listed for them. Now they merely see you as a third party opinion as they should, many Ad Blockers have removed you from their default lists because of the inconsistency of your blocks too, most Ad Blockers are moving your list to the optionals category.

Blocking NOW-DNS a well known DDNS service up since 2015, blocking a new anonymous website host CrazyRDP and lesser known steam rep website SteamCashRep are just a few among the latest blocks which are not factually phishing or scamming or spamming operations.

Yes, you could theoretically use these services with bad intentions, but then that applies to anything. You could say you blocked them from your list because of their lack of response to abuse reports but even then you're just condemning small services such as NOW-DNS and SteamCashRep based simply on the fact the owners doesn't live on the internet or don't do upkeep on their websites.

[Spam404]

Hey @RaidForums,

Many thanks for submitting this issue. We welcome transparent discussion around how our lists work.

As you correctly suggested, we list some domains based on their unresponsiveness to abuse complaints. This certainly doesn't happen overnight and we give plenty of opportunity to services to remove malicious content before adding abused domains to our lists. For the services mentioned, we've had no complaints from our customers or other internet users utilising our lists.

Here's a summary of why the aforementioned services can be found on our lists:

• NOW-DNS: Unresponsiveness to abuse complaints, heavily abused for malware C&C.
• CrazyRDP: A hosting service tailored specifically for cybercrime. They're fairly open about this.
• SteamCashRep: This is directly involved in scamming operations. Specifically, CS:GO item trust trading on the Steam platform.

If you believe a service shouldn't be on our lists, you can file a revision request here. We regularly remove previously offending content from our lists.

Thanks, Cameron Dawe Spam404.com

[RaidForums]

Yeah that's a complete lie. Considering I am one of the blocked domains on your list I can say for a fact that I never received a single notification or warning in any form from Spam404. This is the same with the YouTube link I posted, none of those creators were ever notified or warned, so you have somewhat of a track record.

[Spam404]

Yeah that's a complete lie. Considering I am one of the blocked domains on your list I can say for a fact that I never received a single notification or warning in any form from Spam404. This is the same with the YouTube link I posted, none of those creators were ever notified or warned, so you have somewhat of a track record.

I think you're slightly missing the point. Not every addition to the list will receive some sort of notification before listing, neither is that any sort of requirement. Services tailored specifically for cybercrime and ones that are intrinsically abusive, will be added without such notification. This is to protect our customers as early as possible. In cases of phishing and malware, we almost always send an abuse complaint to the responsible host.

Since you've surfaced the topic anyway, it's evident that your own service has been unresponsive to abuse complaints in the past. This can be clearly seen via the public DMCA notices that Google receives to delist content. There's many examples where companies have first attempted to have the content removed at source, but then had to resort to DMCA notices due to inaction on your part. I'm also aware of cases where Cloudflare has blocked URLs on your service and they've simply been made available via different paths. I'm sure you don't have your head in the sand and are fully aware of what your service enables.

In regards to YouTube, it seems you've failed again to do adequate research. We did in fact notify legitimate channels about violative content but it was requested that we stop and send these directly to YouTube instead.

Thanks, Cameron Dawe Spam404.com

[RaidForums]

Well considering the years you have in this field you should know yourself that we don't host content on our website and therefore we have no obligation to respond to DMCA requests as we don't host said content and there is no grounds for copyright infringement. Not to mention the country this forum is being hosted isn't by law requiring us to do this either. To my knowledge we are simply hosting forum articles made by our users, you can go over those same google DMCA requests and see that this is the case for 99% or more of said "reports". And in fact we only have 1 URL which is flagged by Cloudflare as phishing and this is a miss-flag which we haven't yet contended.

Like as followed in my emails to you this is very opinion based, our website could be deemed as educational. I know multiple fellow students within the UK whom have been linked by their university courses, resources from our website for research. Completely blacklisting us is your choice but it wouldn't be factual to say RaidForums is tailored for cybercrime or intrinsically abusive, the information is there for the public to do as they please good or bad. In conclusion though, I am not making this post here to have you remove the blocks, I know you are very stubborn and won't do that because you have your own opinions on the matter. I am here just to make a public report so I may link these issues to companies who believe your list is very cut and dry, which it isn't.

[Spam404]

Don't drop the soap!

[ghost]

Don't drop the soap!

Dropped, now what?