INOVA Technology (inovatechnology.com): A History of Spam
15th
January 2007
INOVA Technology (inovatechnology.com) is
a California firm dealing in various aspects of IT security.
It has a sleek web site, but a hidden past of spamming
through its involvement with the Topsites
Scam.
Note: this is a Santa Monica company
and is not related to the Pennsylvanian
or Malaysian
company of a similar name, nor the company trading as
123barcode.com.
It gives its contact details as follows:
Head Office 233 Wilshire Boulevard Suite
400, Santa Monica, CA, 90401
Phone: (310) 857 6666 Fax: (866) 467-7940
Formerly known as Edgetech
Services, the company now known as INOVA Technology
merged with the fraudulent Topsites operation in June
2005. Topsites is an operation headed by Edgetech director
Paul Aunger, which has been sending out fraudulent
"renewal" notices since at least February
2001. The Topsites fraud has been extensively documented
here, and it
continues to this day in a somewhat modified form.
Prior to 2005, Edgetech Services was a legitimate
(but struggling) technology firm. However after June
2005 it became one of the world's biggest spammers,
listed
on the ROKSO database at Spamhaus.
In January 2007, Edgetech Services divested itself of
its spamming operations and renamed itself as "INOVA
Technology".
During the period that Edgetech Services owned their
spamming business (called "Web's Biggest"),
the company was a prolific spammer using an operation
in India to attempt to bypass US anti-spam laws. In
an attempt to conceal the link between Edgetech and
the spam, the work was contracted out to Somnath Bharti
of Madgen Solutions who primarily used the domain www-goto.com
to drive traffic to Edgetech's web properties (you can
see the evidence of spamming here).
Although earlier
spam messages from Topsites were clearly deceptive and
in some cases were essentially attempting to blackmail
non-payers, the email messages sent from June 2005 to
December 2006 were differently phrased. However, the
Topsites "business" is a continuous operation
stretching back to 2001 and there is little doubt that
Paul Aunger is the key person in this spam/scam outfit.
It's possible that not all the officers at Edgetech
Services were aware of what Paul Aunger was up to, but
you would assume that at some point they must have noticed
that potential business partners were giving them a
wide berth.
Edgetech Services disposed of the Topsites / Web's
Biggest business to a firm called Advisors LLC
which appears to be run by Paul Aunger.
It does appear that INOVA Technology wants to distance
itself from its history of spam, but it is the same
company as Edgetech Services, with pretty much the same
set of officers. Anyone who wishes to do business with
INOVA Technology would be advised to thoroughly research
the company and its past (and present) links with the
Topsites operation.
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