Overview of spam from CWIX/InternetMCI.com

15 Feb 2006

Note: Automated spam monitoring stopped several years ago. These web pages are maintained for historical reasons. Some may be updated from time to time as news about the individual sites becomes available.

Overview of history

full history also available

General information about CWIX/InternetMCI.com

MCI/CWIX is a network service provider which hosts a number of spammers. Although MCI has an anti-spam policy, they are unable to enforce it. A spammer whose account is cancelled may sign up again right away.

In addition, MCI has a service known as "MCI2000" which is completely rogue. It is not known why MCI does not enforce their acceptable use policy in regards to MCI2000.

Major binary spammer Larry Wojtowicz claims to know the vice-president of MCI personally. It is suspected that he is telling the truth.

MCI is now hosting two or three major spammers; one based in Bloomington (1-800-249-sexy spammer), and two based in Atlanta (TomGartman.com and Special-FX)

MCI may be reached by email at security@mci.net, spamcomplaints@cwixmail.com or via phone at 1-800-550-0927.

MCI may be reached via snail-mail at:

MCI
ATTN Internet Department/Harrassment
PO BOX 4600
Iowa City, Iowa  52244-4600

MCI Communications 
(ATT) Timothy F. Price
1801 Pennsylvania Ave., NW
Washington, DC  

1 Oct 1998:

InternetMCI has been acquired by Cable & Wireless USA. All internetmci.com addresses are changing to cwix.com addresses.

20 Aug 1998:

See Wired's article about the near UDP of MCI.

16 June 1998:

Search parameters now include mci2000.com.

16 June 1998:

Linkus.com, disconnected frmo Netcom yesterday, has been connected by MCI.

19 May 1998:

Tom Gartman, based at PSI has been forging "news.mci2000.com" into the Path headers. This has not affected the counts in this report.

19 May 1998:

A rogue site based at PSI has been forging "news.mci2000.com" into the Path headers. This has not affected the counts in this report.

26 Nov 1997:

Vacation Spammer has moved to MCI

5 Sept 1997:

Netzilla has moved to MCI

5 Aug 1997:

Porn4Porn has stopped.

15 July 1997:

Porn4Porn has moved to MCI

2 July 1997:

The Mailloop spammer seems to have stopped.

30 June 1997:

The Mailloop spammer has begun spamming from MCI

19 June 1997:

Woodside seems to have stopped spamming from MCI

9 June 1997:

The Woodside Literary Agency (aka Photo Phoenix International) fraud is now being posted from MCI. So far, no word from MCI on how long it will continue. Readers are reminded that Woodside/Phoenix is a known fraud. See Jane Hitchcock's story

---

To report spam, contact spamcomplaints@cwixmail.com

A complete history may also be available.

General notes:

• Only a small subset of usenet (261 groups) was sampled. Only articles that hadn't been cancelled yet were counted. Actual spam may have been much greater.
• Heuristics that detect single-posted articles are, by their very nature, somewhat shaky. Innocent articles may be tagged as spam because they share certain characteristics or keywords with actual spam. In particular, a posted spam complaint that includes the spam in its entirety will very often be identified as spam.
• Some posts may be forgeries intended to look like they came from CWIX/InternetMCI.com.
• The first entry in the history file is not used to compute peak or average spam counts, as this entry covers an unknown number of days. This may cause an apparent disreprency between spam totals and spam averages.

Return to top | Return to spam summaries | complete history

The opinions expressed on this page are solely those of Ed Falk and do not necessarily represent those of any other organization, (although I hope they do). I wish to thank Rahul.net for hosting this web page.

This page maintained by Ed Falk