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Spammer Gets Spammed
William L. Jones sent us a link to a wired story about spammers getting what they deserve: it amused me. What also amuses me is my new hobby:
I now send the postage-page envelopes back from junk mailers. Empty. Eat that! 30 cents out of your pocket! Yeah! I guess now that we've evolved past sword fights, I need something to vent steam.
I was a Telemarketer for 3 months. I enjoyed it, the pay was good, and the more weird calls or ranting people I got the better. If someone had a good line to screw with me for a while it made my night interesting. I loved getting snappy comebacks before a hangup or anything out of the ordinary. So please, do Telemarketers a favor when they call you late at night, don't just hang up on them, say something witty or obscene THEN hang up on them. It actually does make the night more amusing.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
a buddy of mine: "oh really? well let me tell *you* about the *great* anal sex I had last night" ... click.
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...my pop was owner of a company and got several calls a day requesting donations.
he finally started saying "Oh, you need to talk to the corporate office, and ask for Mr. Wolf."
Of course, he gave them the ph. number of the local zoo...
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
check out spamcop. They'll notify abuse@, postmaster@, etc., on your behalf. Just cut and paste your spam into their web form. Their cgi does the rest. Scans the headers, locates the true source(s) of the spam, looks up any links/email addresses in the message itself. Works great.
Never meant half of the things I said to you. So you know, there's a half that might be true - G. Phillips
About a decade ago myself and a few friends decided to take action to increase the demand side of the economic equation for recycled paper. At the time, supply of post-consumer recycled paper was about three times larger than demand.
What we did was go to all the libraries and workplaces we could, gather all the postage-paid subscription cards, and write various different economic messages, asking the magazines and software companies to use recycled paper for some of their material. For software companies, it was the manuals; for magazines it was just the insert cards (paper plants to produce clay-content magazine picture quality paper did not exist in North America at the time).
One of the reasons it worked was we had a limited targetted message asking for something that was not only acheivable, but was cheaper too.
For some of these we made stamps to stamp all the cards. Then when our group had collected a few thousand of the cards, we'd send off bundles of 100 or so in different mailboxes throughout the city. For a period of five to ten days. Which meant that thousands of these postage-paid cards would flood the target for weeks on end, from various places, and various people, all at the cost of the magazine which published them.
As a result, a number of positive things happened. Magazines started to send only three or four of those post-paid insert cards in the magazine (before we'd get 20-30 per issue, which kept falling out). They started using recycled paper for the inserts, and sometimes even the magazine (e.g. Science News). And software manuals started being printed on recycled paper.
And since demand for recycled paper increased ten-fold, new non-chlorine recycled paper plants were built in the US and Canada, saving untold forests from being logged.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
My practice for years has been to simply set the phone down gently and let them talk on. Occasionally, if I walk by the phone a few minutes later and they're still talking, I'll pick up the receiver and say "Go on," or, "I'm sorry, I didn't catch that last part, could you go over that again," and set the phone back down. Sometimes they catch on quickly, of course, but some callers will go through their entire script without noticing I'm not there.
The point is not to piss off the telemarketer, that's just fortuitous. The point is to take up as much time on a fruitless call as possible.
Telemarketers' business models depend on their getting through the negative calls in as little time as possible. That is, they *depend* on us snarling and hanging up on them. If instead, the custom were to chat with them indefinitely, the business would become unprofitable, because they couldn't cycle through the negative calls quickly enough to get to a profitable margin of positives. In a polite society, telemarketing doesn't work.
I've been doing this for years. Instead of empty I toss in some prizes. That way the person opening the letter will have something to talk about on their break. All kinds of things have found a new home this way:
- Little plastic army men.
- Out of focus photographs.
- Change. (Costing more in postage than it's worth)
- Lettuce.
- A printed warning about the Goodtimes virus.
dude, get some perspective. I've put in my share of hours deleting spam, but come on - comparing that to rape?
We're in our cushy air conditioned offices working on computers and suddenly exacting retribution on a spammer is "brutish"? It's like a playful slap on the wrist, which will perhaps make them a little wiser.
Vidi, Vici, Veni
I think flat scrap iron would be the thing. That way it will fit *inside* the envelope. See this article for more info about what you might be likely to get away with mailing. And be sure to give your postal servant a small box of chocolates as a thanks.
In a related story, the IRS has recently ruled that the cost of Windows upgrades can NOT be deducted as a gambling loss.
This may be a way for them to confirm.
If they have a domain, trace it back to their provider! Let their provider cut off the service or their provider's provider do it.
I have called spammers and they hang up, so I call back and explain to them how rude it is.
What we have to do is to stop the people providing the SPAM lists. What about the SPAMMERs using open relays being charged with the computer tresspass statute--for using a mail relay w/o authorization?
Fight Spammers!
I have it (on fairly good authority) that the best (worst) thing you can do to a junk mailer is send back those postage paid envelopes with an oz or so of the "sparkles" you can get in most craft shops.
They are stick tenaciously to EVERYTHING, including the scan heads of the mail sorters, and jam up the works. Word has it that it takes about 1/2 hour to clean up after this happens
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Sorry.
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