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Argentina's Other Problem

Argentina is undergoing inflation, a currency crisis, civil unrest in the streets, and its banks are virtually closed. Members of the ISP-Tech list find one more item to add to the list of Argentine woes: open spam relays in the country's cable monopoly.

[February 21, 2002]

On the ISP-Tech list in February, AF complained,

"I keep getting spam from fibertel.com.ar. They don't answer e-mails, and they won't take me off their list. Any advice?"

A number of respondents recommended checking out various free whois tools and spam reporting services:

[JL suggested] "Go to GeekTools and download their whois tool. It resides on your PC, but queries their whois proxy server. It's free, fast, reliable, and priceless. I just used it about an hour ago to look up seven different spammers."

[MW added] "The best tool I've found is SamSpade, which does several different functions. It's free to download, and queries multiple whois servers, along with all of the basic nmap functions. There's also a great web-based tool at www.network-tools.com."

[DD offered] "Check out SpamCop."

Others noted that, since the company is based in Argentina, it's a somewhat unique situation:

[MX observed] "Go to www.nic.ar; under 'consultas on-line,' you can get some info about the domain. FiberTel is a big cable TV and cable Internet provider in Buenos Aires."

[SS warned] "Block 'em. There's a lot of crap going on down there. From what I understand from a spamfighter who lives down there, there is a lot of civil unrest-and even in more peaceful times, the Argentine ISPs didn't seem to give a damn. I wouldn't recommend blocking the entire country, but FiberTel might be a good start. Do a search for 'FiberTel' at Google's e-mail abuse forum for posts about this and other Argentine spammers."

—End