Everybody agrees that spam is a serious problem, but says there’s nothing we can do about it because you can’t trace the sender.
But the spam always asks you for money while they offer to enlarge your manhood or sell you Viagra, or whatever. So why cant Congress pass a law prohibiting use of email to offer unsoliticed commercial products, and prosecute the guy who takes your money?
The return address in the email is always a fake, but the link to a porno site or Viagra seller probably works, and must be traceable. And when some sucker actually gives his credit card number, somebody’s bank account grows fatter.So it should be possible to set up a sting-let the police order some Viagra from the site, after entering the site through the link in the spam message. Then when the Viagra seller subtracts the money from the police’s credit card–arrest the guy for fraudulent use of email.
Why won’t this work?
One thought: the person who is going to profit from any sales can always claim to have been set up: yes he is running that business, but no he did not send the spam e-mails (he sells via his legitimate web site); must have been a competitor who wants to put him out of business.
To disprove this defence you’d need to trace the e-mails to the sender, to avoid which was the object of the OP’s proposal.
In addition to what others have said, you have a jurisdiction problem. US laws against spam assume that only Americans send spam to Americans. While this may be dominant now (though American spammers frequently bounce their emails through offshore servers, notably in China, Korea and Russia judging from the profiles of spam I receive), if spam was outlawed in the US, the spammers would just move offshore. Offshore casinos work perfectly well, and states can pass laws against their citizens patronizing them, but they can’t enforce laws against non-US companies. There are no borders on the Internet, and laws enacted by geographically-restricted governments will have little or no effect. IMO, only technical solutions (filters, blacklists, etc.) will prove effective until the vigilante squads of angry midwestern housewives rise up against the porn spammers and bludgeon them with pie tins.
I don’t have much of an answer to the OP, but I have been wondering the same thing.
Spam is not just some jackass emailing their stupid opinions (“I really like cheese”) to everyone. Spam, to me at least, is always some form of commercial solicitation. There is SOME mechanism to get money from the spam recipient. Can’t we just do what deepthroat told Bob Woodward to do, and follow the money?
Since it’s almost always a credit card involved, can’t Visa and Mastercard help out by refusing to assist known spammers?
It seems like a no-brainer, but spammers are known to spamvertise totally unrelated 3rd party stuff as a diversion. Someone on slashdot mentioned in the last spam related article, that they received angry e-mails after a spammer used a program of theirs in that manner.
Because it’s not in their interest to do so. I bet if you were to ask Visa/Mastercard directly, they’d say something like, presently spam is not illegal, or at least in a gray area (yes I know some states have anti-spam laws). They probably add that it’s not their business to police how people use their credit cards, as long as it’s not blatantly illegal (e.g. buying cocaine). And they just keep ringing up their 1% per transaction (or whatever it is) - ker-CHING !
I’m beginning to think the only way spam will go away is if people never every buy the products advertised, and in fact actively boycott any business that uses spam marketing, to the point where businesses that use spam become “persona non gratis”.
Perhaps the way to stop people buying from spammers would to exploit the very gullibility of the stupid people who actually buy penis enlargement kits or septic tanks from spammers: start an urban legend that if you buy something from a SPAM ad, you computer will automatically get infected with a virus and become non functional. A sort of “viral” disinformation campaign.
I wish hackers would go after spammers, rather than trying to bring down CNN or Yahoo.
As email works now it is impossible to do anything about spam. The only way is to have a different email system which would allow tracing the emails back to the source and authenticating the senders. I think this is the way to go and it would probably start as a separate, new, email system, used by corporations at first, and then would spread and eventually replace what we have now.
Alot of spam is just referral email. The person who sent it gets a penny or two everytime someone they sent the spam to goes to some site. So knowing who owns the site won’t let you know who sent the email.
Even if you trace the spam, the spammers often break into someone else’s computer to send the spam.
One thing I don’t understand about spammers. There seems to be an arms race between spam filters and spammers. Why? If I am using a spam filter, then I don’t want spam and will not respond to it. So why do the spammers want to bug me anyhow. The only people who will read it are the three people in the world who actually want to read it. I have read that it costs .1c to send a piece of spam. So one million spams still costs $1000. If the average “take” is, say, $100, then there have got to be 10 people who respond. I don’t know who they are, but I am definitely not one of the them. So if I set up a spam filter why should the spammer still want to bug me. For instance, I would not buy a Norton utility if it were the last utility left on earth. Sure, Norton probably doesn’t encourage it, but they have to know it is going on. So why, why why?
I can see them trying to get around filters for atleast two reasons. First of all, ISP’s filter out quite a bit of spam, so what your seeing, has to make it around ISP’s filters first. Also as far as the spammer is concerend (statisticly), if you want the spam or not, the more you receive, the more likely one of them is to spark your attention and for you to buy something.
The economics of spam is generally not to sell product. It’s to sell lists of spam. This explains why they try to go through filters – spammers sell live e-mail addresses.
In fact, a recent article described how someone set up an e-mail account, started getting spam, and they started replying to the spammers saying, “yes, I want to buy your product.” Well under half those he contacted replied. And if you aren’t interested in talking to someone who want to buy your product, you aren’t interested in selling it.
Contacting the supposed sender is useless. All too often, the only purpose of the spam is to get your name and sell it to others. The manufacturer of the product may not even know.
It certainly does NOT cose 0.1c to send spam. If it did, 99% of all spam buisnesses would bo bankrupt overnight. The reason why spam is so successful is that it costs closer to 0.00001c to send an email.
Actually, sailor is right. As of right now, there’s no way to authoritatively track an email down to a particular account on a particular machine on a particular provider’s network - everything in SMTP (the current mail transport protocol) that purports to do this is potentially forgeable and therefore worthless. The problem is that even though lots of people realize this, there’s been no proposal for a replacement protocol , because nobody has figured out a foolproof and forgery-proof authentication system. If they did, it would be very easy to block spam by blocking any mail host that authoritatively sent you even one piece of spam. As it is, the best one can do is digitally signed mail, and most people don’t do this.
RealityChuck is most probably also correct. With the statistical exception of a very few hardcore spam marketers, and of course the Nigerian Scam types, most of the spam these days seems to be metaspam - that is, people trying to convince naive newbie entrepreneurs that if they buy their spamming system, with verified address lists, they’ll get rich overnight. This of course requires various nefarious tricks to get those verified addresses, which is where a lot of spam comes from.
Actually, not a bad idea, at least with porn sites. Most porn sites these days use third party billing systems like CCBill, GloBill, and iBill. In fact, those three providers would cater to around 80% of all porn sites.
Those billing providers are quite legit, but they do tend to turn a blind eye when their customers - the porn sites - do dodgy things like spam, so long as it does not seem to affect anyone. If enough people complained about a given offender, though, they’d have stern words with said porn site, and probably shut them down if they continued it.
The problem is, there are so many porn sites, and so few people who care about spam enough to go through popup hell to find the account number of the offending website. It’s probably a three minute job; I get about 150-200 spams a day, and I doubt I’d spend three minutes deleting all of them (so if I tried to track down an offender for each one…). Sure it’s annoying, but it’s just part of life. Personally, I am much more annoyed by ads on cable TV (I pay for that service!).
Someone mentioned that it’s often third parties who do the spamming, and that is certainly true, but the “it’s someone trying to put me out of business!” argument won’t wash with any ISP or billing company.
Incidentally, hosting companies usually have much more stringent anti-spamming rules, so it’s worth complaining to the company that hosts the site, as well (www.samspade.org is an excellent tool for finding out this info).
Most of the really virulent spam I get is from Korea, and in Korean. (I don’t speak the language and am really curious why they are sending all this to me.) Following the money would cost me more money than deleting fifteen gibberish spams a day.
Lately I’ve been using Mozilla 1.3 as an email client. It uses a Bayesian statistics approach to filter spam. It is extremely effective, with no false positives for me so far. (A false positive is when a non-spam email gets junked as spam.) They’re other filters with a similar approach (e.g., Bogofilter.
What’s really great about this statistical approach, is that learns to identify spam by comparing to your valid emails. So the filter behaves differently for different people. This will make it very difficult for spammers to defeat.
