Veteran GOP Spammer Darian Rafie Exposed
Hucksters can exclusively reveal some of the ongoing illegal email spam campaigns being managed by Darian Rafie, a veteran marketing consulting and evangelical Christian who has been assisting big-name Republican politicians, as well as small-time local churches.
Although Rafie has been involved in email marketing for many years — much of which we have little information about — his latest service is so blatantly dishonest that we felt the need to expose it. (In fact, one email chain from over 15 years ago reveals Rafie was trying to assist SpamAssasin’s developers in blocking blatant email spam.)
The latest mass-email fraud that Rafie is running is called eMagnify, hosted at emagnify.com. Rafie purposefully runs the website using a “broken” SSL certificate, so that search engines like Google don’t index the content (and most users won’t be able to load it properly), which gives Rafie a (dishonest) bare-mimimum excuse of a front-company to run his scam.
Although he tries to make it seem like eMagnify is an independent email marketing service, it is actually built on top of a UK-based email technology company called Adestra, which is ran by Henry Hyder-Smith. Based in the incredibly high volume of emails being sent, the massive “purchased” contact lists being uploaded to their servers illegally (which violates the CAN SPAM Act), and surely the high amount of emails reported as spam, it seems apparent that Hyder-Smith is aware of the scheme, and possibly even assisting Rafie in his efforts. It is also another example of American operatives partnering with overseas providers in an effort to avoid the potential legal backlash that their activities attract.
The domain WHOIS data is also set to private, however using our OSINT research methods we were able to tie that website back to Rafie and his real company, bep Consulting, based in Chicago.
As far as his client list, it is a “who’s who” of practically every major Republican campaign and outreach organization with ties to national Republican Party politics. This includes groups like:
ARTICLE TO BE EXPANDED SOON