cogent spamming directly from ARIN records?

Mon Oct 2 18:58:07 UTC 2023

Hurricane has been doing the same thing lately... but their schtick is to say that "we are seeing a significant amount of hops in your AS path and wanted to know if you are open to resolve this issue".

compliance at arin.net is about all that can be done, other than public shaming! 

Other outfits have been spamming using the nanog attendees list, but I guess that’s not as bad as the continued scraping of ARIN records, so I won't call them out... yet, at least. 😊

-----Original Message-----
From: NANOG <nanog-bounces+tim=mid.net at nanog.org> On Behalf Of Mel Beckman
Sent: Monday, October 2, 2023 10:28 AM
To: nanog list <nanog at nanog.org>
Subject: cogent spamming directly from ARIN records?

This morning I received an email from someone at Cogent asking about an ASN I administer. They didn’t give any details, but I assumed it might be related to some kind of network transport issue. I replied cordially, asking them what they needed. The person then replied with a blatant spam, advertising Cogent IP services, in violation of the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act’s prohibition against deceptive UCE.

I believe they got the contact information from ARIN, because the ARIN technical POC is the only place where my name and the ASN are connected. I believe this is a violation of Cogent’s contract with ARIN. Does anybody know how I can effectively report this to ARIN? If we can’t even police infrastructure providers for spamming, LIOAWKI.

 -mel beckman