As Intended: False Positive: ViralURL.com & www.ViralURL.com

[add2it]

* Operating System: Windows XP Professional
* Browser and Version: Internet Explorer 7 & FireFox 3.0.1
* Version of Spybot S&D and Date of the latest update: 1.6.0.31 10/09/2008
* where did the false positive occur: not reachable/restricted website

ViralURL.com & www.ViralURL.com website not reachable (listed in Global (Hosts))

My name is Frank Bauer, co-owner of the ViralURL.com link protection service.

Our domain had been added to your software in June 2008 and we have since then tried to contact you to find out...

a) Why it has been listed and

b) what we can do to get it off your list.

If there is anybody I could call and talk to, that would be great.

Best regards,

Frank Bauer

Director of Add2it.com Marketing Pty Ltd
Co-owner of ViralURL.com


PS: I do speak English and German, if that's of any help.

 

[Yodama]

A quote from your website:

You will not get emails from people below you. The only people you will get emails from are your upline and the odd Gold member. This is NOT a safe list, so even though you can potentially email 30,000+ people per month, you will only get a some emails per day and can opt-out at any time.

Emailing 30,000 members in a quality, targeted, safelist would normally cost you $247+ for every email; here is your chance to email 3,000 members every 3 days (30,000 per month)...for a whole YEAR!

That sounds a lot like a spam network and some kind of pyramid system.

It also appears that your whole busyness is based on distrust against end users:

The SHOCKING truth is that you are getting ripped off! It is proven that many customers; when they see your affiliate link in the URL bar, replace it with their own, and often even just cut it off! This means, your hard work and marketing costs are being blown with the customer RIPPING you off

This claim needs to be proven and you fail to do so.

Cloak Your Links (<2mins)

Promote Your New links!

How are the links supposed to be cloaked and what are the legal consequences of this?
How are your users supposed to "promote" their new links? Through email like mentioned above?

Your site tells alot about how good using your service is supposed to be but you do not clearly state how that is actually done. There is also no information about privacy.




Additionally the whois information is anonymized which is very suspicious for a legit company.

 

[add2it]

Hello Yodama,

That sounds a lot like a spam network and some kind of pyramid system.

Members that join ViralURL have to read and confirm that they agree to our terms: http://viralurl.com/terms.php

As they (and you) can read in there, in order to provide this service for them for free, they agree to receive messages from other members through our system. They only email address is not passed on to anybody and they can upgrade or unsubscribe to stop receiving messages at any time.

Also, as you can see there we only pay commissions on on personal referrals that upgrade their account (only on service product sales). So it's not a pyramid system either.

If you are interested to see what our customer say out our service, visit:
http://viralurl.com/testimonials.php

It also appears that your whole busyness is based on distrust against end users:

This claim needs to be proven and you fail to do so.

Could it be that you are not knowledgeable in the area of affiliate marketing? Just take a quick look into Google's search results... http://www.google.com/search?q=clickbank+commission+theft

How are the links supposed to be cloaked and what are the legal consequences of this?

Links are cloaked using HTML frames and PHP redirects to hide the actual affiliate link from the eyes of the person clicking on your link and to this way prevent that those people either remove your affiliate ID out of fear of paying more (which is not the case) or replace your affiliate ID with their own to cut you out of the commission and earn the commission themselves instead.

Cloaking affiliate links is 100% legal and there are no legal consequences in doing this. In fact... many affiliate program owners higher encourage to cloak your links.

How are your users supposed to "promote" their new links? Through email like mentioned above?

There is almost no limit in the ways ViralURL members can promote their cloaked links as long as the method of promotion they choose is legal. We e.g. don't allow the use of UCE (aka spam) to promote any cloaked links and suspend the accounts of users that are reported to us for doing so.

Your site tells alot about how good using your service is supposed to be but you do not clearly state how that is actually done.

You can find more details in this in our members area as well as in tutorial videos we now made publicly available at:

General overview over the ViralURL System - http://viralurl.com/video-overview.php?aff=presents

ViralURL Cloaking Section Tutorial - http://viralurl.com/video-cloakingsection.php?aff=presents

ViralURL Advanced Cloaking Section Tutorial - http://viralurl.com/video-advancedcloaking.php?aff=presents

ViralURL Email Section Tutorial - http://viralurl.com/video-emailsection.php?aff=presents

There is also no information about privacy.

You can find our privacy policy at: http://viralurl.com/privacy.php

Additionally the whois information is anonymized which is very suspicious for a legit company.

That was simply for the reason that our domain registration service gave that as a free bonus for registering a domain with them. Since that's an issue for you, we now turned that function to protect us from on- and offline spam off.

Please let me know if you have any other issues in regards to removing ViralURL.com from your database.

Thank you and warm regards,

Frank Bauer

Co-owner of ViralURL
Director of Add2it.com Marketing Pty Ltd

 

[add2it]

I just upgraded SpyBot and see ViralURL.com is STILL falsely listed.

When does this company plan to fix their false accusation?

Best regards,

Frank Bauer

Co-Founder of ViralURL.com
Director of Add2it.com Marketing Pty Ltd

 

[Yodama]

We appreciate that you made some changes to your site, it is still in review and you will be notified here if we change detection on your site.

 

[add2it]

How much longer do you estimate will your company need to recognize that ViralURL is not a thread to anybody?

 

[ColinKlinkert]

Unlist Please!

Hi Spybot Team,

I am Frank's partner, the other owner of ViralUrl. As you can see we have TrustGuard on our site, we have hundreds of positive testimonials, we act VERY FAST to suspend ANY member who spams (as soon as it is reported, we mail the member and suspend their account).

Basically we run a very legitimate and Professional online business. Frank below answered every question you had and went into a great deal of depth. Please see that we do fully comply and please remove us from your block lists.

Thank you very much for the good work you do and in advance for correcting an error

Colin Klinkert

Hello Yodama,



Members that join ViralURL have to read and confirm that they agree to our terms: http://viralurl.com/terms.php

As they (and you) can read in there, in order to provide this service for them for free, they agree to receive messages from other members through our system. They only email address is not passed on to anybody and they can upgrade or unsubscribe to stop receiving messages at any time.

Also, as you can see there we only pay commissions on on personal referrals that upgrade their account (only on service product sales). So it's not a pyramid system either.

If you are interested to see what our customer say out our service, visit:
http://viralurl.com/testimonials.php



Could it be that you are not knowledgeable in the area of affiliate marketing? Just take a quick look into Google's search results... http://www.google.com/search?q=clickbank+commission+theft



Links are cloaked using HTML frames and PHP redirects to hide the actual affiliate link from the eyes of the person clicking on your link and to this way prevent that those people either remove your affiliate ID out of fear of paying more (which is not the case) or replace your affiliate ID with their own to cut you out of the commission and earn the commission themselves instead.

Cloaking affiliate links is 100% legal and there are no legal consequences in doing this. In fact... many affiliate program owners higher encourage to cloak your links.



There is almost no limit in the ways ViralURL members can promote their cloaked links as long as the method of promotion they choose is legal. We e.g. don't allow the use of UCE (aka spam) to promote any cloaked links and suspend the accounts of users that are reported to us for doing so.



You can find more details in this in our members area as well as in tutorial videos we now made publicly available at:

General overview over the ViralURL System - http://viralurl.com/video-overview.php?aff=presents

ViralURL Cloaking Section Tutorial - http://viralurl.com/video-cloakingsection.php?aff=presents

ViralURL Advanced Cloaking Section Tutorial - http://viralurl.com/video-advancedcloaking.php?aff=presents

ViralURL Email Section Tutorial - http://viralurl.com/video-emailsection.php?aff=presents



You can find our privacy policy at: http://viralurl.com/privacy.php



That was simply for the reason that our domain registration service gave that as a free bonus for registering a domain with them. Since that's an issue for you, we now turned that function to protect us from on- and offline spam off.

Please let me know if you have any other issues in regards to removing ViralURL.com from your database.

Thank you and warm regards,

Frank Bauer

Co-owner of ViralURL
Director of Add2it.com Marketing Pty Ltd

 

[ColinKlinkert]

Hi Spybot Team,

Been a week since my last post, wondering if anyone has seen it yet? If so can you please give us an answer? Thank you for your time

 

[jaydee888]

Hi Spybot Team,

Been a week since my last post, wondering if anyone has seen it yet? If so can you please give us an answer? Thank you for your time

Colin,

While I do not pass judgment on SpyBot for taking the offensive on errant websites, I do feel that you guys are victimised without proper investigations but just plain fear and witch-hunting. Besides, spam has nothing to do with malware or spyware. While spamming is against the law, it affects the mailboxes. Malware and spyware affects the browsing experience and plants trojans and worms for devious intentions. That's why I have protection using Spybot Search and Destroy. However, recently, while Spybot returns that my computer has a clean bail of health, BUT when I scanned my computer with AVG and Adaware, it picked up at least 14 trackers/dataminers and 3 trojans. This has been happening for the last two months. Does not look right. Who do I trust?

Anyway, back to your plight. By the way, can you kindly stop your following affiliate from spamming my mailbox please? I have received close to a hundred duplicated mails today from this spammer. I do not mind advertising mails but no spamming in the hundreds of the same content please.

Refer to this cloaked link generated using ViralUrl.com:

http://vur.me/makebig/PushMakeMoney/

The affiliate's email address: "Push The Button Marketing" <dbiggestlaunches@ gmail.com>

Hey, I also noticed that all your links, including www.viralurl.com, return with broken links. What is happening? Your hosting server is acting up, I think.

 

[PepiMK]

As for "14 trackers / data miners"... tracking cookies are something that is often detected "for counts".

When we started, we didn't want to add any at all. Just switch your browser to not accept third party cookies and you're good (inofficial howto's from me here).

But people came along complaining, and public perception of what is unwanted is something we have to take care of as well. Still, we try to not add more unless really wanted by many users. In 2.0, we'll have a scale from 1 to 10 regarding the threat level, and guess what, cookies (aka tracking cookies, trackers, data miners, ...) are 1, the lowest score

I don't have any exact information on the viralurl.com review process, but looking at the name alone makes me look twice, and visiting the site only to be stopped by a popup when trying to close it are not really giving me a good feeling. As for cloaking, since I read it above, it may be legal, but is it legit? From a moral standpoint, I want to know if someone recommends something out of financial interest or believe, and affiliate IDs in links do tell me that, so I personally do believe cloaking them is a moral attempt of deception (a general standpoint, haven't seen this special cloaked links).

This wasn't intended to describe any reason of why we detect it or a position of the review process, it was just my personal opinion after looking at the thread and page for just a few minutes.

 

[add2it]

@jaydee888: The member with the ID makebig is a free member, so he can't send messages to other members using our system. So I assume he must have spammed you through his own ISP (Gmail.com). In that case I recommend to complain to that ISP (check the headers of the spam email you received) if he doesn't provide an unsubscribe link.

@PepiMK: What is the current status of removing ViralURL that is still falsely listed in SpyBot?

Are you saying we got listed because some thought the name looked scary? The service we are offering is 100% legal and legitimate.

I can tell by your comments that you don't seem to know very much about the problems associated with affiliate marketing and that cloaking links is to protect the affiliate, not to cause harm to the person clicking on a cloaked link.

Are you saying it's immoral to protect the interests of affiliates and internet marketers?


Please let me know the status and how much longer your company will need to remove that one URL from your database.

If there is a reason to keep us in that database, I would like to know the exact reason for it.

Thank you for your cooperation in finding a quick solution to this already way too old problem.

Best regards,

Frank Bauer
Director of Add2it.com Marketing Pty Ltd
Co-founder of ViralURL.com


PS: If you need mailing of phone contact details, please refer to:
http://Add2it.com.au/contact

 

[spybotsandra]

Hello,

It is not falsely listed as you can see if you have a look at Yodamas september post.

Anyway.... if you would like to have an official review feel free to e-mail to:
reviews(at)spybot.info

We will not discuss this any further in our forum.

Best regards
Sandra
Team Spybot

 

[ColinKlinkert]

Hello Sandra,

We sent an email after your reply a few weeks ago and have had no response. Please may you let us know the status of this situation, thank you

 

[add2it]

Hello Sandra,

Yodamas posted in November that it's being reviewed... any updates? It's almost May now and it would be great if we could stop telling our 46,000+ members to stay away from SpyBot.

Best regards,

Frank Bauer

Co-founder of ViralURL.com
Director of Add2it.com Marketing Pty Ltd


PS: For all of our valued ViralURL members reading this, Sandra just replied via email to another member of ours:

Please open the Tools menu in your Internet Explorer and choose 'Spybot - Search Destroy Configuration'.
There you will find a drop down menu where you should select "Ask for blocking confirmation".
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/spybotsd15/index.html (3rd picture)
If you want to visit a blocked website choose "Allow". Hope this solves the problem.
If this doesn't work please run Spybot-S&D and select "Spybot-S&D" --> "Immunize" in the navigation bar on the left. Please hit "Undo".
Then run Spybot - Search & Destroy and switch to the Advanced mode via the menu item Mode.
Now select 'Tools' - 'Resident' from the navigation bar on the left.
Please untick the checkbox in front of the 'SdHelper'.

 

[Yodama]

Please don't make comment anymore on this issue.
As Sandra already stated the detection on this will not change.
If you do not see what may be wrong with your kind of marketing there is no room for further discussion.