How to deal with spam about kiddie porn

In My Humble Opinion
1

I had not experienced this.

I get as much as 40 - 50 spams a day about the usual stupid stuff - penis enlargement, my roommates so naughty, whatever. I delete it and move on. Then I got one that said “The best in child pornography”. Made my hair stand on end. I ended up deleting it just like the others, but I find I am still thinking about it - even if the subject line was just to get my attention, I still want to pummel the senders.

What is the right thing to do? Ignore it, delete it and move on, like other spam, as I did? Or is there some authority that specific, truly bad spam can be referred to? If there was something I could do to nail these bastards without putting myself in a position where I would get even more spam, I would do it in a heartbeat…

2

Just delete it. It’s probably a fake anyways. Opening it will tell the sender they’ve hit a live e-mail address and continue to send you crap. Considering the seemingly infinite number of domain names and infinite number of email addresses per domain, they’ll never be caught.

3

I got that one too. I decoded the attachment without opening it, it turned out to be advertising a website that claimed to sell shoulder-launched anti-air missiles, drugs, bomb-making tools, child pornography, gay sex slaves, and had an ad for “SAGO networks: Spam hosting no one can stop.” I’m thinking it’s just BS designed to get people to visit the website, which probably has more benign material on it. The ad for hosting is probably a smear on a host or network that dumped them for spam, since it provided all sorts of contact information for complaints. Anyway, I dropped the full headers and decoded attachment into the FBI “Submit a Tip” form, they said it had been forwarded to their “innocent images” task force, or something to that effect.

Generally, if you come upon child pornography in e-mail or a newsgroup, you should send the full headers of the message to the relevant law enforcement agency. Remember, do NOT send any content: transmitting child pornography, even for the purposes of reporting it, is a crime.

4

Okay, Alereon - thanks for both the advice and your experience with that particular spam.

5

I don’t think I believe this. Could you give a cite, please? Say a cite of any case where someone reporting child porn to a law enforcement agency was charged with distribution?

6

Eh, I forwarded the whole thing to the FBI when I got something like this. They didn’t give me any hassle for it. YMMV, of course.

7

You have trouble believeing it? You don’t have much experience with the Feebs, do you?

8

Can you sue them for false advertising?

9

Alereon’s experience makes it sound like it’s the site discussed in this Snopes page.

10

Yeah, that’s the one we got. Knew it was BS:)

11

I find a lot of times the ISP has an email set up for you to forward these kinds of things to. For example, I got some kiddie porn the other day with a bellsouth.net address. I forwarded it to abuse@bellsouth.net and got back an autoreply message stating that they take spammers seriously and want to stop it and blah blah blah.

At least I felt like I was doing something useful.

12

The problem with that is that the sender address is often forged, thus making it difficult to track down the actual source of the spam.