
Who is running the Pandemic Survival fear-mongering spam campaign - ophelia
https://osint.fans/coronavirus-spam-selling-pandemic-survival-ebook
======
pmachinery
A one post fake blog about absolutely nothing[0], knocked-up five minutes ago,
on a garbage domain extension registered a few weeks ago, exploiting the
clickiest topic of the day and posted to HN. Who's the coronavirus spammer
here, exactly?

[0] The only issue after wasting my time reading most of the post is that it
was, according to the author, spam (UCE). Otherwise it's no more remarkable
than any other affiliate marketed ebook trash that aren't worthy of blog
posts.

To fill the article the author complains that the book simply gives "trivial"
tips; but if the tips are good advice ("proper handwashing techniques") or at
least not harmful, so what? Maybe there are people who don't trust the Federal
Government or UN or WHO or CNN but take advice from the kind of thing you
might find advertised on alexjones.com.

The rest of the article is just about the ways companies hide who they are and
use fake office addresses. Again, so what? It's not something I particularly
support or agree with but it's commonplace, not a secret and seemingly not
illegal.

I was struggling to see why this was written, other than it's related to the
topic of the century, until I noticed it was a fake site with only one post
and that _is_ the only reason it was written.

~~~
cy_hauser
I suspect the idea was to expose them, hurt their business, and maybe turn the
eyes of the law in their direction. I don't see anything that would bring
about the level of anger you express unless you're tied to their profits. Are
you?

~~~
pmachinery
Are you selling a potentially illegal pandemic ebook and hoping to profit from
a competitor being taken down?

Baseless paranoid accusations are easy, and completely missing the point of a
post - annoyance at low-effort junk posted to HN by site owners for the
purpose of leeching page rank - isn't an excuse for resorting to them.

------
ddmma
Quackery is often described as "health fraud" with the salient characteristic
of aggressive promotion.”

In the medieval times this was done by shouting in the public markets, today
using affiliate marketing networks targeting millions of emails. Surely they
don’t target people that can reason and ignore/ delete their messages but the
ones that click and follow the dodgy trail.

Here is an interesting podcast about Scams - You Are Not So Smart Podcast 097
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8mbW18RcO8Y](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8mbW18RcO8Y)

Ref:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quackery](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quackery)

------
zipwitch
I misread the title. I was really hoping this was a link to house-rules on
playing the Pandemic cooperative boardgame with the COVID-19 coronavirus as
the disease.

~~~
WorldMaker
Using a mix of Legacy and Expansion Pack rules: Sharpie the name COVID-19 onto
the game board for your least favorite color. Every outbreak of that color is
now doubled (as if it had been drawn twice from your deck). It's up to your
group if you want that to also effect overall difficulty (if those double
outbreaks count as double towards the game's lose condition counter).

------
dhosek
Kind of ironic that halfway through reading an article about spam, they have a
popup on screen begging me to sign up for their mailing list.

------
vorpalhex
Title doesn't match source.

"Coronavirus spam selling the 'Pandemic Survival' ebook"

------
smoyer
I read the article to the end and was half expecting the answer to be "Alex
Jones". Hopefully he doesn't reappear so easily after being banned from so
many platforms!

~~~
cy_hauser
I know ... could have easily been something he was selling. (Looks like a few
Alex Jones fans here. Hi to you too.)

~~~
smoyer
I'm not here to gain karma ... and I'm willing to have a discussion with Alex
Jones fans too so long as they stick to facts and avoid hyperbole, mis-truths,
etc.

------
droithomme
The article mentions yomali out of Malta. Yomali's just an ecommerce, billing
and hosting site doing payment processing for the people selling these guides.
Much as Google and AWS host services for numerous questionable companies.

Malta has some weird tax advantage apparently because a lot of ecommerce goes
out of there. Also Cyprus.

Yomali's owned by an Israel guy who says his name is Mike Peters. (
[https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/326673](https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/326673)
)

It's likely he and his company have little to do with these ebooks other than
handling payment processing for them along with many other small companies.

~~~
Nursie
Malta appears to be somewhere you can get an EU banking license without quite
so much scrutiny and oversight as some of the larger places. Coincidentally
quite a few cryptocurrency-related organisations have moved their HQ there...

