Brandon Sheley Spamming Constantly

Posted by David on Jul 24, 2010 in Brandon Sheley | 19 comments

This Report comes courtesy MrGTB who was a member at a forum that got absorbed in to one of Brandon Sheley’s forums. Brandon has been purchasing dead forums and databases and merging them into his general talk forum. Not a new strategy by any stretch of the imagaination, but following the merge Brandon Sheley then sends out a spam e-mail to members of the old forum instructing them to come back.
Here’s the complaint from MrGTB:

Yesterday I got an unexpected News Letter sent to me from a particular forum board I joined a while back. And I didn’t have to guess twice which forum in question it was sent from, one owned by “Brandon Sheley” called General Forums. The thing is though, I shouldn’t have got that News Letter because I have my “Members Profile” set-up there to Not receive anything from the Administrator. And this is something I do with every vBulletin Powered Community I join, not just his. And it’s done during the initial registration stage when first joining.

However, I decided to double check my profile settings over at General Forums to make sure I hadn’t over-looked it previously. But things were as expected, it was indeed activated in my profile settings already.

Why I suspected the News Letter came from Brandon Sheley

The reason why I said above: “I didn’t have to guess twice who’d sent the News Letter“. Was because I’d been reading on another forum I visit, “Brandon Sheley” talking about trying to promote his forum further and was looking for News Letter software he could use with his vBulletin board.

Knowing Brandon Sheley like I do (from past dealing with him), he went and did exactly what I suspected he’d do to try and promote his forum. That of ignoring all his members who had chosen Not to receive any “Forum Board Messages” like News Letters. He went ahead and sent it anyway to them, which is something you can do by over-riding your members profile settings in vBulletin as (Owner/Administrator).
Take great heed of Brandon Sheley’s mistake

It’s not something you should do lightly as a forum board owner if your members have chosen otherwise to receive them, because it will annoy the hell out of them for very obvious reasons. Plus, you may lose those members as a result for good.

And this is exactly what’s happened with me now. I’ve added Brandon Sheley’s forum board email address to my spam list in Hotmail, no longer will I bother with his community. Especially after seeing that the News Letter sent from General Forums was marked (week 1), meaning he intends to spam his members with weekly news letters.

You can see the strategy here, buy as many dead forums as possible, merge them together, spam the crap out of everyone, then sell a dead forum based off the post count. We hope anyone who gets soaked into his forum has a strong spam filter, or can figure out a way to opt out of the constant spam. It’s bad enough spamming, but then changing the forum e-mail address to fool spam filters maybe a new low for common spammers like Brandon Sheley.