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Fighting The Spammers Down Under

Posted by timothy on from the squash-foot-squash dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes: "The Sydney Morning Herald is running an interesting article about fighting spammers. It mentions that "Most of today's email spam, however, comes from a handful of culprits, described by Barry and others as &quotknown criminals&quot." Does anybody else wonder who these people are, and what are the odds of having them shut down for good?"

4 of 274 comments (clear)

  1. "These People" by Bender_ · · Score: 5, Interesting

    www.spamhaus.org has a list of spammers and the ISPs supporting them. They also have some quite interesting articles on this topic.

  2. Re:it has to be profitable... by darkonc · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Every once in a while I get spam from someone who gives an '800 number to fax orders to....

    I send them off a nice fax, on a 50% grey scale, full page background which orders them to stop spamming..

    Why 50% grey scale? Because it's near worst-case for fax compression (which expects mostly blocks of white then smaller blocks of black). Faxing a 1 page grey scale at 1200 baud can take 90 minutes (800 number, remember? It's on their quarter).

    I'll usually do a voice callback first to make sure I'm not responding to someone who's being smurfed by an enemy.

    --
    Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
  3. Support the FTC by SomeoneYouDontKnow · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If the FTC is really serious about going after spam, then we need to give them our support. More than that, we need to make them do their job with this. If most spam is fraudulent, and if most spam is sent by a relatively small group of people, then it stands to reason that getting rid of these hard-core spammers will go a long way toward reducing the spam problem.

    Now don't get me wrong here. I'm not naive enough to believe that this is going to be easy. Spammers are slippery little worms, and stopping them for good won't be easy. However, there's nothing like a court order to give someone an attitude adjustment.

    So here's the deal. The FTC wants to receive spam at uce@ftc.gov, so send it. My guess is that they like getting all spam, but bear in mind that they don't have jurisdiction over spam per se, just spam selling fraudulent goods and services. This is something they can latch onto and run with because they are empowered to stop fraud. If you send, be sure to include full headers so messages can be tracked back to the source. That way, if a spammer hops from ISP to ISP, it may be possible to construct a pattern that can be used to find and nail him.

    As I said, I don't count on this to work, but if the FTC really is serious, then let's give them the evidence they need to bust some balls.

    --
    That light you see at the end of the tunnel might be from an oncoming train.
  4. Beware all opt-out lists.. by jcr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The Direct Marketing Association has this little checkbox on their page, which says "notify me when my listing expires".

    EXPIRES? WHAT THE FUCK?

    If I were naïve enough to belive that any of the sleazebags in the DMA would actually honor this list for *any* amount of time, I'd be pretty pissed off when the spam started flooding in when their database says my "leave me alone" notice has expired.

    I trust these people about as far as I can throw them.

    -jcr

    --
    The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."