Vernon Chalmers SEO

Dear Vernon. Thank you for your post, I appreciate that you were upset about the breach and again apologise unreservedly. To clarify just a few points regarding your post which I feel should be included, just to place the conversation in context

I would appreciate it if we could add the following verbatim:

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On the 12th of April one of our new staffers erroneously sent out an email
addressed to you using outlook rather than our emailing system within
OfferForge. It was well intentioned but bypassed our usual protocols of
emailing from within our network.

As a result of this error your email was visible to others who received the
mail. Unfortunately an unethical recipient decided to use the mail to reply all
and spam you.

Please accept my apologies for any inconvenience caused by this error on
our part.

We are pursuing legal action to ensure that the information is not further used.
Should you receive any emails I would be grateful if you'd forward these,
headers intact to me personally for further action.

To ensure this doesn't reoccur we've taken the appropriate steps internally
to retrain our team on the use of our systems and on our privacy and data
management policies.

We've further restricted user access to limit the information that can be
viewed and exported to ensure that your data remains secure. In addition
all user activity is recorded and regularly audited by our compliance officer.

Again, please accept my sincerest apology.

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From this mail, Vernon, I hope the take aways are:

1. We screwed up and inadvertently circulated your mail. In 10 years this has never happened before and most certainly can never happen again.

2. We communicated with all potentially affected individuals (not many) and told them when we discovered the fact.

3. We've taken legal action to protect your rights as we know the individual that sent the spam.

4. We've reviewed and further tightened our access controls to ensure that your data is and remains secure.

Vernon, we are really sorry to see you go as we've alwasy valued you as an affiliate publisher partner. Be assured that as an organization we've learned from this have responded proactively.

I am always available for comment or questions.

This posts highlights the lack of privacy or rather privacy controls within the South African online marketing industry. It's very important that industry organisations like Internet Society be made of aware of this, so they can take necessary action.

Ramon, you do make a good point. It's also important that organizations learn and improve. I doubt there's any company in the world that at some time hasn't messed up.

I believe we responded proactively when the breach was discovered and we've received more than a few accolades from loyal and successful affiliates for the way we handled the issue.

This philosophy is what's helped us to continue to grow by over 100 publishers per month (we only accept roughly 1 in 8!)

We now have over 12,000 publishers reaching the South African market, and I'm very happy to report that our privacy and email controls are well maintained and regularly audited.

I suggest you take this up with Offerforge South Africa. Also recommend to centralise your complaint(s) / syndications in your own name ans not just to blast off anonymously. I did notice a similar complaint elsewhere under a different name.

If you strongly believe in [any] wrongdoing you should rather speak out in your own name / and publish / syndicate with all facts.

Regards, Vernon Chalmers