Stay away from Damien and his company SupremeBytes. (my review)

You can see proofs that we will refer to throughout this thread in the moke.zip file that is linked here -

https://www.dropbox.com/s/sl0r0wbxnf099kh/moke.zip?dl=0

 

 

Introduction

Well I rented a /21 of ip addresses from Damian around 5/13/2014 because he had a great price and I didn't have to go through the ARIN process to get them. We had just moved out of colocrossing and needed to source some ips quickly that were of similar price so we could stay in business.

Everything was good for the most part up until Dec, 2014. If you look at the file myinvoices.png in the zip you will see we paid our for the /21 every month. Keep in mind we were billed 30 days in advance.

Our ips were revocated with 21 days notice, we did not have time to get a new range and moke/damien did not care.

Revocation Notice

It was my fault for not getting a signed contract with Damian/moke but I trusted him since everyone over in #vpsboard irc seemed real friendly with him and I know he had been in business with SupremeBytes for a while. On Dec 9th 2014 he sent us an email that said our ip addresses would be revocated due to the large number of spam and abuse reports from our ranges. You can see the email correspondance in the files revocation.png revocation2.png revocation3.png and revocation4.png.

In the past we had opened tickets asking him to set the abuse address to our abuse channel so we could receive abuse and spam complaints and take care of them without him having to be bothered. He said it wasn't possible. We suspended every user that he sent us a report about, and cleared the ips with spamcop (who was sending him the reports.).

In his revocation notice on Dec 9th he said we needed to return the addresses by the end of the month. I asked him if I could get the ips until Jan 15th because of the upcoming holidays and that it was going to be near impossible to source more ips before that deadline. He never responded.

So now we have 21 days to get a new address range for our entire customer base with christmas and new year holidays approaching.

We get with ARIN for ip addresses.

We pretty much immediately got with arin for ip addresses but you know they take a few business days to respond to each thing. They eventually asked us to please contact our ISP and ask them to reassign the range to us so they can count it towards our justification for an initial allocation. I opened a ticket with Supremebytes on 12-16-2014 that you can see in the file mokerefuse01.jpg. Damien responded pretty quickly and asked me to provide my ARIN ticket number and org-id. That same day I responded to him via email with our ticket number and org id and you can see this in mokerefuse02.jpg. A week passed so I contacted im via IRC when I saw him login, he then refused to update ARIN over irc private messages. You can see this in mokerefuse03.jpg. At first he ignored me completely but eventually responded so I private messaged him which you can see in logwheremokeignoresme.txt

We have now wasted a week because of mokes/damien's decision to not update arin.

He sends our datacenter a revocation notice early on 12-16-2014

The same day we opened the ticket for him to update arin, he sent our datacenter a letter asking them to stop routing our range. You can see this in the folder ipsrevokedearly and file damianremoverecordrequest.png Our datacenter processed this on 12/29/2014 so our range was revoked two days earlier than we told our customers BUT if it was up to Damien our range would have been revoked as soon as he sent that letter in. Just check the wording

I was furious and called him out publicly in IRC to get our ips back on.

On 12/29 I got on IRC and called out Moke/Damien on revocating our addresses early. You can see this in mokepublicircwhenheterminatedmyips.png in the ipsrevokedearly folder. When our datacenter asked for another LOA to get the ips turned back on he instructed us to forge a document. He instructed us to put a different date on the initial LOA that they sent us months ago and send to our datacenter with the correct date.

We finally have our ARIN ips and they are routed.

Our customers were down for a month because of this fiasco. We finally got our arin ips allocated and routed at the datacenter today. We decided to go with ARIN so we couldn't be treated like this again. Damien really had no reason to revocate our ip addresses. Maybe he needed them for himself or another larger customer was needing them and wanted to pay more. We don't really know, but what we do know is that Damien didn't value our business. We once tried to rent a dedicated server from him a few months after getting the ip addresses and he NEVER responded to our ticket. We would have done almost anything to keep this address space until we were able to get ARIN ips.

Conclusion

You can form your own opinion about Damien and SupremeBytes through this thread, but ours is to please stay away and do not do business with this company.

I am, as always, interested in the quantity scale of abuse complaints you get every month, on your customers. If you have a customer base that produces large amount of spam listings every month, then I am not really sure who is in the right.

Again, just "if", since a rough quantity scale has not been provided in OP.

sundaymouse said:

I am, as always, interested in the quantity scale of abuse complaints you get every month, on your customers. If you have a customer base that produces large amount of spam listings every month, then I am not really sure who is in the right.

Again, just "if", since a rough quantity scale has not been provided in OP.

Click to expand...

What do you expect when your business requirements are that you get a /21 for ~$150/month?

He has some very supportive/understanding customers to stick it out for *a month* while you work with ARIN.

Francisco

sundaymouse said:

I am, as always, interested in the quantity scale of abuse complaints you get every month, on your customers. If you have a customer base that produces large amount of spam listings every month, then I am not really sure who is in the right.

Again, just "if", since a rough quantity scale has not been provided in OP.

Click to expand...

It was in the files. 8.1% of the users had a poor reputation on senderbase. We were willing to work on this number and get it down to an acceptable in his eyes number.

Francisco said:

What do you expect when your business requirements are that you get a /21 for ~$150/month?


He has some very supportive/understanding customers to stick it out for *a month* while you work with ARIN.


Francisco

Click to expand...

Well funny thing is since we are with ARIN now we get it for $83.30/mo so I don't really know what you are basing that on. He offered that price. I didn't ask for it.

He didn't stick out anything for a month? He stuck it out for 21 days that I had ALREADY paid for.

Man this is rough.  How many complaints were inbound and how many IPs soiled?

Spam is always the client's responsibility to clean.  Failure to do so gets you dropped.  Now not being able to route those complaints to you is just bad, no way to clean things up on manual pass through route. PITA.

IP leasing requires a detailed contract so everyone is covered.  Doing a deal without such is just a terrible idea for both parties, and for the legit customers.  Point proven and understood.

That said, there have been other recent complaints about SupremeBytes' uneven support response times.

coreyman said:

Well funny thing is since we are with ARIN now we get it for $83.30/mo so I don't really know what you are basing that on. He offered that price. I didn't ask for it.

He didn't stick out anything for a month? He stuck it out for 21 days that I had ALREADY paid for.

Click to expand...

ARIN issued costs are different than aftermarket rental/leasing/purchase of IPs.

As far as leaving you stuck without the IPs, that surely wasn't cool.  Things like this are in best interest of both parties to work together, be it painfully.

Downtime of a month is just bonkers if I read that right....

coreyman said:

Well funny thing is since we are with ARIN now we get it for $83.30/mo so I don't really know what you are basing that on. He offered that price. I didn't ask for it.

He didn't stick out anything for a month? He stuck it out for 21 days that I had ALREADY paid for.

Click to expand...

ARIN's always the cheapest option, especially if their new pricing gets approved.

I agree, he shouldn't have robbed you of the time you pre-paid though.

Francisco

drmike said:

Man this is rough.  How many complaints were inbound and how many IPs soiled?

Spam is always the client's responsibility to clean.  Failure to do so gets you dropped.  Now not being able to route those complaints to you is just bad, no way to clean things up on manual pass through route. PITA.

IP leasing requires a detailed contract so everyone is covered.  Doing a deal without such is just a terrible idea for both parties, and for the legit customers.  Point proven and understood.

That said, there have been other recent complaints about SupremeBytes' uneven support response times.

Click to expand...

As stated up there(you probably replied before seeing it). 8.1% of the users had a poor reputation on senderbase. We were willing to work on this number and get it down to an acceptable in his eyes number.

I agree SPAM is the responsibility of the client, but abuse complaints were poorly routed to us. A lot of the time after it went to damien and then he opened a ticket with us the user had already abused and left the network.

I agree I should have had a contract. It was stupid of me to not have had one.

Yes we were down for a month while we waited on ARIN's back and fourth.

Francisco said:

ARIN's always the cheapest option, especially if their new pricing gets approved.


I agree, he shouldn't have robbed you of the time you pre-paid though.


Francisco

Click to expand...

Well he didn't rob us, after I called him out on it (since he did send the notice on the 16th). It would have been good of him to let us pay even DOUBLE what we were paying just to keep them for another month(and we would have) so our customers didn't have this downtime.

coreyman said:

Well he didn't rob us, after I called him out on it (since he did send the notice on the 16th). It would have been good of him to let us pay even DOUBLE what we were paying just to keep them for another month(and we would have) so our customers didn't have this downtime.

Click to expand...

I fully agree, maybe even if he insisted that you blocked outbound mail ports just to be safe.

Honestly, I wouldn't doubt he found someone offering more cash for the subnet since $150/month on a /21 is pretty damn insane pricing.

Francisco

Francisco said:

I fully agree, maybe even if he insisted that you blocked outbound mail ports just to be safe.


Honestly, I wouldn't doubt he found someone offering more cash for the subnet since $150/month on a /21 is pretty damn insane pricing.


Francisco

Click to expand...

That was exactly my thoughts, but like I said - we would have paid more, done pretty much whatever he wanted.... just to keep those until we could get through the ARIN process.

We actually purchased a /22 for that same price before ARIN approved us (half the ips) - but the datacenter is running into some issues with the routing so we were able to get our ARIN ips online before that range so it was kind-of pointless.

Not SWIPing the IPs to you was a dick move also. Regardless of the situation, if somebody has a /21 the first step to take after filling out the LOA is getting them SWIPed. It's not like it costs anything or takes more time than filling out the LOA.

KuJoe said:

Not SWIPing the IPs to you was a dick move also. Regardless of the situation, if somebody has a /21 the first step to take after filling out the LOA is getting them SWIPed. It's not like it costs anything or takes more time than filling out the LOA.

Click to expand...

I believe it is a requirement of ARIN as well if you assign over a /28 to someone that you have to SWIP it.

(Moved thread to Reviews forum)

coreyman said:

He didn't stick out anything for a month? He stuck it out for 21 days that I had ALREADY paid for.

Click to expand...

I think Francisco was referring to your customer's sticking it out for a month (or 21 days). Will you, at the least, be crediting them those 21 days?

rupe said:

I think Francisco was referring to your customer's sticking it out for a month (or 21 days). Will you, at the least, be crediting them those 21 days?

Click to expand...

Ahh yes Ive credited accounts per basis upon request

I had actually purchased a /21 from moke which happened to be the neighbouring range of yours and let me say your range was trashed more than some of CC's!! every report you could imagine, previous spamhaus, malware db's etc. Your side of the /21 whether intentional or not screwed up his entire /19 (of which I was in)

Your entire /21 at one point was listed on spamhaus!

And the /21 I was assigned from moke was never used,  it was only blocked because of abuse on the other /21 (i guess the entire /19 was blocked at a lot of places due to collateral damage?)

a

I don't think its unreasonable at all to revoke the IPs, from what I saw there was a lot of spam emitting from the ranges.

ChrisK said:

I had actually purchased a /21 from moke which happened to be the neighbouring range of yours and let me say the range was trashed more than CC!! every report you could imagine, previous spamhaus, malware db's etc. Your side of the /21 whether intentional or not screwed up his entire /20 (of which I was in)

Your entire /21 at one point was listed on spamhaus!

And the /21 I was assigned from moke was never used,  it was only blocked because of abuse on the other /21 that is part of the parent /20

a

I don't think its unreasonable at all to revoke the IPs, from what I saw there was a lot of spam emitting from the ranges.

Click to expand...

My /21 had nothing to do with his or yours, if he or you had spam reports and malware dbs etc on the other block then that was on him. Senderbase showed around 100 ips with poor reputation. If a customer opened a ticket that an ip was on a blocklist then it was instantly removed.

My entire /21 was not EVER listed in spamhaus as I was actually in contact with them at one point and asked how to receive abuse reports directly. I was told damien needed to SWIP... of which he never did. Spamhaus had my contact information as well as Damien. Damien never sent me a spamhaus report. What was the 'neighboring' range you speak of?

Also if he would have swipped something, then none of this would be an issue

Also also - maybe he should have sent me reports when they came in? I can't control the issue two months after the report comes in as the damage is already done.

None of your announced ranges are neighbors of that range we had... http://bgp.he.net/AS40440#_prefixes

I never said it was unreasonable to revoke the ranges. He could revoke them for whatever he wanted... what was unreasonable was that he didn't give us enough time to source ips elsewhere and gave us the middle finger.

coreyman said:

My /21 had nothing to do with his or yours, if he or you had spam reports and malware dbs etc on the other block then that was on him. Senderbase showed around 100 ips with poor reputation. If a customer opened a ticket that an ip was on a blocklist then it was instantly removed.

My entire /21 was not EVER listed in spamhaus as I was actually in contact with them at one point and asked how to receive abuse reports directly. I was told damien needed to SWIP... of which he never did. Spamhaus had my contact information as well as Damien. Damien never sent me a spamhaus report. What was the 'neighboring' range you speak of?

Also if he would have swipped something, then none of this would be an issue

Also also - maybe he should have sent me reports when they came in? I can't control the issue two months after the report comes in as the damage is already done.

None of your announced ranges are neighbors of that range we had... http://bgp.he.net/AS40440#_prefixes

I never said it was unreasonable to revoke the ranges. He could revoke them for whatever he wanted... what was unreasonable was that he didn't give us enough time to source ips elsewhere and gave us the middle finger.

Click to expand...

Damien refunded my order and I halted the announcement, they were beyond screwed.

Before I even knew about you and this thread I told Damien that there looks to be some bad people on the other part of his /19.

If you google your IP range and then spamhaus theres even people on google groups talking about spam emitting from your /21

Senderbase should only be used as a reference nothing more, sometimes it can be far form the truth.

His entire /19 is most likely blocked at the big email providers etc as collateral damage.

A SWIP wouldn't do anything but hide the abuse from Damien, do you have any system in place to prevent spamming off your service?