Doing Business Internationally Doesn't Mean Doing Business with all Countries

I've been getting a lot of requests from businesses wanting to be "distributors" of the SpamButcher mail blocker from countries we normally don't do a lot of business in.

I always answer the question the same - we don't have a formal retailer / distributor program - but that they're welcome to purchase bulk licenses and then resell them to clients.

About 2 months ago I had such a request from a certain country - and gave the standard answer. They purchased a single copy. The country in question has historically accounted for about 10% of all downloads - but hadn't been the source of a purchase in over 3 years.

When I got around to doing my periodic check for abused serial numbers - I found they'd installed and registered something around 60 copies of SpamButcher. I suspect they were actually reselling their single license to their clients over and over again.

Even more alarmingly - the copies were getting installed in a variety of networks throughout the country - so the serial number was getting spread around. It is very rate that a paying customer actively shares their registration code with others in this manner. My biggest concern was that the serial number would eventually spread to countries that have a track record of actually purchasing SpamButcher - and hence cut into business.

I disabled the serial number (yes, we can do this) - and then banned all further web traffic from that country.

This may be controversial - but I don't see at as any different than a company shutting down operations in a country that's not making them money.

To add further annoyance, the offender continued to send me support requests - which I chose to ignore. Eventually they figured out that their serial number wasn't working - and purchased another one (apparently I failed to block all networks from the offending country).

I promptly disabled their new serial number. When they demanded to know why their new serial number didn't work, I told them as politely as I could that I knew what they were doing, and that they needed to go away.

Regions of the planet that generate a massive number of downloads - but no sales are piracy cases waiting to happen. If you are a webmaster who suspects the web traffic from a region of the world is a liability, don't be afraid to block it.

Email system administrators have the same option when configuring a spam filter program running on their server. If they find their server is getting tons of spam email from certain regions of the planet, but no legitimate email - blocking those nations is an option they may want to consider.

Back