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Feds Cracking the Whip on Spammers
Britano writes "Fox News is reporting that the FTC has started to go after spammers and online scammers. So the governement has finally started on the side of the consumer. "The Federal Trade Commission announced Tuesday that is has created a nationwide task force that has already brought 63 law enforcement actions against Web-based scams ranging from auction frauds to bogus cancer-curing sites." Hey, this way we don't have to spend our own money on fighting this problem!"
Where do you think our tax dollars come from?
love is just extroverted narcissism
I bet them spammers like the taste of the whip! Filthy bondage whores...
I sure hope they'll go after the spammers in the EU as well.
if this page will disappear as fast as the previous repeat about Kazaa...Posted by CmdrTaco on 15:30 3rd April, 2002 from the wow-this-is-crazy dept.
I'll say it again:
What happened to the other story?
From what I have heard, it isn't so much spammers as scammers. They are shutting down the illegal scams. If you have a real business, but use spam to advertise your product, I haven't read anything to indicate that they are being targeted.
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
So, I can get the US government involved since I got a copy of Visual Studio.Net without CD #2? I need it, because MS sees it as an impossible occurance..
Not!
I like to protect myself, give me guns, source code and allow me to filter/shoot my way free.
--Order through Chaos?
when /dev/null does it for free ? :-)
Smile, don't click...
don't pay your taxes much, eh taco?
That it took so long for the Feds to finally realize that crimes on the Internet are no different than those off of it? Bogus charities and pyramid schemes have existed long before the net. It shouldn't be any different, should it?
If I weren't nailed to the penis, I'd be pushing up the daisies!
What about Alex Chiu?? :P hehehe
Our tax dollars are going to fight Spam. Don't get me wrong I would pay an extra $50 a year to receive less Spam, but lets wait and see how affective the FTC really will be.
where exactly do you think the gov't gets that money?
Though, I think that this collective move is definitely better than dozens of individual efforts
Um, who do you think pays for the FTC to do this in the first place?
If you can manage to track the spammers down in another country...
Anyway, this is mostly about scam spam. This wont even effect the "buy a million addresses on a CD" spam as long as they are actually selling that product.
This just cracks down on something that was already illegal--it really doesn't have anything to do with spam.
for the government to get it's invasive little paws into the stream of email everywhere! Sounds like an excuse to install "Herbivore". "It's a SPAM-fighter! Honest!" Can't wait to see my tax dollars at work.
Should there have been [sarcasm][/sarcasm] tags around that? Geeze, I hope so.
Seriously though - as much as I desire 'less government,' I do struggle with this one every day as I download hundreds of obvious scam, porn and stupid attempts to trick me into "clicking here" or "going there."
My gut tells me that this won't do much though
What I really need is for MS to incorporate the "bounce message" feature into Outlook Express as Apple has done with OS X Mail!
"Cyberspace is a wondrous place, but we are quickly learning it can also be a dangerous place for the unwary," she said. "Con artists who once relied on telephone boiler rooms and mass mailings can now rip people off through Web sites and e-mail."
In a related news story, Fox reports that gullible people often get ripped off.
Ok, here's the thing. I strongly believe spam would go away if people would QUIT BEING STUPID. If they would just think for a minute and say hmm, it seems this magic Cancer cure is too good to be true. Why haven't I heard about it in other sources? Now, I will say that these bastards selling hope in the form of a cancer cure is genuinely despicable, and they need to share a room with Bubba for doing it. However, WISE UP PEOPLE!!!! Do you really think xsegry17l33t@yahoo.com is a viable businessman? Come on!
-5 redundant
Sent from your iPad.
So, add that to Securities and Exchange commissions abuse site enforcement@sec.gov and you have some good places to forward your spam.
Send all "Great new stock tip" crap to the SEC, send all the ripoff products to the FTC, and copy Spamcop on everything, and maybe we can crush these bastards.
(Hey, by placing these addresses on a public site like
www.eFax.com are spammers
In the case of spam the only effective solution is filters. Of course, if you download all the mail to your local spool and THEN apply the filter you haven't saved much. A better idea is a centralized filtering agency, set up by the government.
We'd all be assigned an email address (like we have a snail address) that email would be sent to. Automated programs would deleted "For Your Eyes Only #087A" crap and trained agents would sift through everything else.
Only by constance governmental vigilance can we keep our email freedom!
"I think all of us have found something in our e-mail that is highly suspect," said Eileen Harrington, associate director of the FTC Bureau of Consumer Affairs. "They may be subject to law enforcement."
;-)
Does this mean that I can sue all these US spammers who invite me to become a callgirl, get cheaper payments om my house, get a higher turn over on investments or grow a larger penis
Not that I actually fall for these things, I never assume for a minute that I can get a loan in the US based on my house in the Netherlands, but it would be nice to sue somebody, just for the experience...
I can get really pissed of about this stupid spamm stuff which does not even discriminate the difference between continents when offering local (scam) stuff.
Apparently the FTC doesnt know the differance between spam and scam. All their bust have been scammers.
.. because after I read a story here last month and found out about the uce@ftc.gov address they want spam forwarded to, I've probably crashed their email servers 10 times with the volume I've pushed to them.
People - use this address to bounce your spam to - it appears something is actually being done about it!
(This is debatable) Better to have the feds go after these people then report to spamcop and have, well, ISPs breathing down your back.
I understand the desperation that's felt by someone with cancer, but really, what kind of person is going to believe that the miracle cure for cancer is sitting on some shady website and not in the hospitals?
A fool and his money are soon parted...
This is only happenning because the online scam people don't have an effective Washington lobby and don't make enough campaign contributions.
After the FTC goons have pushed them around a bit, they'll get the idea and start paying the protection money, ah, sorry, right, that should be the "campaign contributions" (like the media industries do).
Buy a few senators and the FTC will fight with you not against you.
So the governement has finally started on the side of the consumer.
Let's not get carried away there. I have no illusions about gov't. and it's attitude towards consummers. I'm sure he government is just looking for a way to tax spammers. There's money being made and not spread around the right circles.
I have automatically directed some SPAM to the FTC. I have an address on my website, for SPAMBOTS to grab. This address has an automitic forward to uce@ftc.gov. Some spammers might be smart enough to filter out .gov, but this avoids the filter.
Fight Spammers!
Well, that takes care of this week's spam...
As much as I detest spam, it at least inspires most people to develop BS detectors.
Well actually, yeah, we do. The task force will be driven by the FTC, which means that you paid for it in the form of tax dollars. Just like you pay to have a police force and public schools.
This time around, though, instead of those of us who have to deal with spam daily paying to treat the symptoms, the government (and us, by extention) will be paying to attack the disease. Still a step in the right direction.
If they're whipping spammers, I want video of it!!!
It will continue to grow, and as it grows, it will need to find more and more things to arrest people over to justify its existence.
When the feds get together with the music/movie cartels, there will be a mutual embrace, as they know their existence will be a symbiotic one.
I was loooking forward to bumping up my Karma but cut-n-pasting all the old +5 posts from the old one. Oh, well...
Before
|=D
After
|==========D
Get our patented forumla now
This just cracks down on something that was already illegal--it really doesn't have anything to do with spam.
Even if that's true, what's wrong with the feds finally enforcing laws that have been skirted for years? The only thing wrong with the stories about this is the headlines. They should read: Feds finally creack down on long-running crime
Nope, no sig
Yes, send it to them if they want it.
One thing you shouldn't do, which sadly, too many end up doing.. is bouncing it back to the (fingerquotes) sender (end fingerquotes).
More often than not, bob@randomisp.net isn't the one spamming you. Bob is just your average Joe who thinks spam is that stuff in a can that tastes darned good friend up on toast. (No, really, try it sometime.)
Anyway, the people who think they're 'sticking it to the spammers' by sending spam back.. Are really just contributing to the problem. IMO, they're no better than the actual spammers.
*hands out clues* E-mail addresses can be forged. Servers can be used to relay things. Maybe you should talk to a system admin somewhere, but it's not going to be Bob, who's just trying to check how his shares of Hormel are doing.
I'm suspecting that Shifman Consulting won't be on the list of people to be sued. I don't recall ever seeing Bernie Shifman providing or ever promising a service, other than providing hemorrhoids to his spam recipients.
The Queen Mum goes up to heaven. She meets up with Princess Di.
"Hi there Gran. Welcome to Heaven!"
"Oooh, Diana. That's a lovely halo!"
"That's not a Halo, Gran. That's the fucking steering wheel!"
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
Apparently the state of Washington is already going after this Walker guy, as of last October. So the feds are a little slower, at least they've jumped on the bandwagon...
Got Wisdom?
I actually receive less spam online than i do offline - sounds weird i know and i dont use any filters...How do i do it? - the way most of you do it?...use forwarding and make use of my domain name email service. :O WTF - that was nothing - a few weeks later (im a male) i had a big cover for Ms.Atari2.6K with the same typo in the name - sigh. Now what?
Now what do i do about postal spam - take credit card offers for instance - the law says im responsible for such material - so i should make sure i shouldnt be getting them...ha! what was that and the spam i get i spend a good time tearing it down and filling up my bin
Hold on what am i saying here? The time i took my telephone service (Verizon) the guy noted my name with a typo and i had my first bill with a typo - a month later wonder of wonders i had a Viagra and stimulate your sex drive envelope with the same typo in the name
Atari2.6K
oooooh whatch out spammers, the Feds are out to get you! You'd better just pack your laptops and find something else to do. Look at what they did to pirate software sites: brought them ALL DOWN, and threw millions of webmasters behind bars! Haha, now the web is free of warez/filmz/crackz/mp3z/gamez sites, and soon our mail will be free of spam...
oh actually wait a sec.... never mind.
how does one change his
Come on! larger_dicks@yahoo.com and flkaof@yahoo.com would stop sending out their spams if ppl STOP READING THEM!!! Come on, people are so stupid they dont even question or search for better sources, they just believe that there is a magical stuff that grows their penis, or that they can earn 10k on a day! Come on... if ppl were not so stupid spammers would never existed!
Fabio - Sumare/Sao Paulo/Brazil/South America/Earth/Solar System/Milky Way/Universe
http://www.morroida.com.br
Quoting the article...
So the governement has finally started on the side of the consumer.
I'd replace 'consumer' with 'online retailers who are afraid it will hurt their business' (most likely hurting business by spam/scams betraying the trust of the consumer, which in turn makes them wary of making purchases online).
Hey, this way we don't have to spend our own money on fighting this problem!
You ARE spending your own money fighting the problem. Ever heard of taxes?
Shape them up. Get them straight. We need to go forward and move ahead. Try to detect spam. It's not too late to whip them. Whip them good.
There should be a spam tax, or something similar.
This is all commercial speeach, and so therefore the government can charge a fee to defrays the costs to the system.
My own solution is to make every spammmer have a spamm license, so that they are easily traceable for billing purposes. We can all bill them. I have also suggested a cute orange ear tag for spammers, nut this is merely an optional element for the plan.
The other part of this is to make it profitable for people to track down illegal spammers and get them arrested, make them pay the fees we shoiuld be charge them. Enough people do this for no money [track them down], and are expert at it, so why not let them get some financial reward out of it?
Future spam:
Make Money Fast Tracking Down Illegal Spam!
[smile]
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
it's always interesting to read all the possible things a guy can be tricked into doing with his penis (enlarging, pumping, drugging it with viagra (herbal or normal), etc...)
it's a whole new world for a gel
Ooh! Touched a nerve? We all die, eventually. Its just a ride, maaan!
I'm glad the FTC is finally taking a bit of action in this regard, but it's true they can only go after a limited scope of spam. I see a vast majority of spam now sends people to web sites in China or Russia to get ripped off via credit card. The FTC has no power there. And the spam for these scams is relayed off Korea, who complains when spammers from the U.S. get their IPs on blacklists. Then you have all those broken routers that crackers can take over the IANA netblocks due to BGP insecurities and effectivly erase where the spam came from. Who to target in the fight against spam? All of the above. Except the FTC of course :)
I don't believe that this idea is for the best yet. I hate spam as much as anyone else but, when the government starts to regulate what you or anybody can or cannot send online, I'd say it starts to become a regulation of speech. Don't get me wrong, I hate spam. I don't give out my e-mail address to any business if I can help it. I believe one of the easiest routes to take is to not give out your e-mail address to online businesses. Or set up a dummy address for all the crap that you've signed up for. I've always enjoyed using the Internet because of the lack of regulation on speech. This is just another step in the wrong direction. I'd rather delete spam and configure mail servers correctly and fight spam intelligently rather than have the government regulate with stupidity and make the problem go away along with some of my rights. Peace out...
Not that spam is meat, but anyone notice the appropriateness of the name Carnivore?
Dude, you can't legislate against stupidity. You can't buy a commercial on national television and shake your finger sternly at the world and say "stop being stupid!" and suddenly all of the suckers disappear off the face of the earth.
You and I would walk by a game of three card monty and laugh. A rural teenage tourist would possibly be suckered in and lose $20. That's why you still see that game on the street. It works, and it always will.
"There's a sucker born every minute" as Barnum would say.
What about the elderly, who might be losing their faculties and are preyed on by these folks? Is it still the victim's fault in your eyes? Blame the victim, blame the victim. "Look at what she was wearing! She deserved to be raped." How does that sound?
The point is, if you are in a position of greater knowledge, looking at a group of people with less knowledge and saying "stop being a bunch ignorant fools!" doesn't do a dang thing for anyone, doc, except maybe for your feeling of self-righteousness, sorry to break it to you. Ironically, your attitude reveals a naivete about how the world works, similar to other forms of naivete that suckers of scam-artists possess.
"Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me."
In your book is it "fool me any time, shame on me"?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2002/04/spam.htm
Plenty of further links to PDF's of the FTC's spam actions.
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Wait a minute.. are you sure this wasn't supposed to be posted on April Fool's Day? ;-)
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Back in 1997, I started forwarding every piece of fraudulent spam that I received to the ftc. By that, I mean stuff about pyramid schemes, tax evasion and all the "send me your bank details so I can deposit $100 beelyeeon dollars", clearly labelled with a stock header that identified it as a consumer complaint. Can you guess the result?
The FTC told my ISP to disconnect me for spamming them.
Not once did they respond to my emails personally. If they'd provided (at that time) decent online contact details, I would gladly have used them. If they'd told me to stop - once - I would. They didn't. They just ignored me for a few months, then went crying to my online momma. Fortunately, the techie at my ISP who informed me of their complaint saw the funny side, and told them to get lost, but I stopped sending the emails out of courtesy.
So, OK, give them the benefit of the doubt, but bear in mind that they might be soliciting, but it doesn't necessarily follow that they're listening. Quite apart from the resource problem, unless they've been beaten hard with a hell of a big clue-by-four in the tech section, this might turn out to be no more than a PR exercise, just collecting metrics that will get filed away until their next budget pitch. Just a thought.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
....here FWIW.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
echo @sub.domain.com uce@ftc.gov >> virtusers
cat >> epilog.php
echo "<noscript><noframes>";
for($i=30;$i-->0;)
echo "<a href=mailto:",md5(uniqid('')),"@sub.domain.com> foo</a>";
echo "</noframes></noscript>";
...all the spam traffic is bogging down Carnivore.
I thought Spamcop was a good idea until I realized that spammers were including the To: addresses in the bodies of spam. This is roughly equivalent to just replying to the email, since many times complaints will make it back to the spammers. I don't use them anymore.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
The post is mis-labeled. Stopping spam is
not the same as cracking down on fraud in
auctions or preventing web sites from promoting
non-drug company sanctioned health treatments.
This is just a thinly veiled excuse to use my
tax dollars to protect me from myself -- and
the definition of "protect" is also iffy.
Personally I have had enough of government intervention, because it puts us all closer to socialism. I hate to see the governemt get too involved in any means of communication, but there is a true problem with spammers and the sickening scammers. I just hope this isn't the beginning of the end of freedom on the internet for the lawful users.
Dang it... I just sent you an email telling you about a great new product to grow your penis at least 2". I thought you really could use it, and now I'm going to get in trouble with the FTC. :(
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
So, what do libertarians think about this? Isn't the market supposed to regulate itself?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Seems like a good idea at first, but when you think it through you realize that it's all relative. "stupid" is defined by anything that's lower than the average IQ.
If you instantly got rid of anyone more stupid than you... you'd be the one considered stupid. Think about it. That's why I hang out at the casino. Honest.
When was the last time you heard of a spammer/scammer hiring a lobbyist or making a campaign contribution? These e-slimebags don't have the resources of the "old economy" slimebags. That's why tree-killing landfill-filling postal spam continues unabated. That's why telemarketers interrupt our lives daily. It's a big dirty business with big dirty money going to big dirty politicians.
We need a universal opt-in policy for all forms of spam.
"Saddam Hussein cavorts with terrorists."
Can someone explain to me how the government spending money means we don't have to spend our own money? Uh, where the fuck do you think the government gets its money? From taxes on the us!!
I wish everyone would get it through their heads that government services aren't free!
[ home ]
I only get about 2 or 3 e-mail spams a day, I must be trained by my environment to say something like that, but the amount of ICQ spam is absurd. I actually started getting less e-mail spam when my ICQ got bombarded. I guess I am worried that there will just be another quick and easy medium to go to if e-mail is taken away from them. And I know they don't send me an opt out option in ICQ.
They ask for SPAM scams (I know redundant) to be sent to that address. I just automated the processes.
Fight Spammers!
So what about the 'spammers' that offer an opt-out solution but as soon as you remove yourself from their list they sell your email address to another company or sign you up for 3 additional 'newsletters' about how to lose 30 lbs in 3 days.
I've tested this with brand new email accounts. Sign up for 1 slightly dis-credible newsletter amd then remove yourself. See how many emails you get in the next week or so.
The point is that there are enough checks and balances to slow down the legislative process so that far-reaching, encroaching legislation doesn't show up overnight. How would you like the alternative? One day a group of lawmakers decide to outlaw mouthwash. Next day, it's a law, and people are getting thrown in jail for it. Then it takes years to overthrow it, people have their lives severely impacted, etc.
The whole structure of our government is to balance power to protect the people from harmful government interference. Part of this is slowing down the legislative process, allowing time for deliberation and compromise between the branches of government.
It really is more for your protection than you think.
120 characters isn't enough to explain it.
Well the starting to regulate internet like that, is troublesome, and will effectively kill the internet. What I am for, is for innovative technical solutions, not tardy government legislation that suppose to "influence" spammers. Spammers are least ethical people on the net, often do everything to hide traces of their origin, but product that is hosted somewhere offshore, so your little hands cannot touch, but with credit card. Regulating internet with stomp out innovation, the primodal drive behind internet's *REAL* innovations(forget about one-click). I am not sure why ./ is so happy about it.
If the warrant is too broad, even by a tiny margin, you can generally make a very good case for throwing the entire case out. The FBI isn't stupid enough to "drag net" or "trawl" (indiscriminate monitoring). In fact you **COULD** argue before the judge that it is the FBI agent that should be before the judge because IIRC trawling is a felony for any federal law enforcement officer caught doing it.
See quite simply they cannot mass monitor an entire protocol because not only is that generally illegal as it is considered trawling, but it is also a damn easy way to get all of your evidence declared tainted by any good liberal or (true) conservative judge. The judges we need to worry about are not the bleeding heart liberals or traditional conservatives, but the ones that defy ideological boundaries and are drunk on state-power. In fact I'd be willing to bet that a good conservative judge would be more likely to reprimand the FBI than a leftist one.
I see signatures from Russia, Singapore, etc. These are the newcomers. The smarter guys are still from abroad, but remail.
If the governement taxed email at one cent a message, it would hardly dent legitimate users. However, that would be fatal to spam/scammers.
This is a start. But it doesn't go far enough. The real problem with SPAM isn't that alot of it is scams or cheap porno get-your-dick-sucked come ons. The real problem with SPAM is that it STEALS OUR BANDWIDTH. By being responsible for 30% of the traffic on the internet, SPAM steals the true potential of the internet from us all. OUR Internet is slowed down 30% because of SPAM.
I am a moderate Libertarian, but this is something where the market can't regulate itself. There are many such situations, where the market doesn't regulate itself on par with the ideal. M$ is one such example.
In this particular case, SPAM, it doesn't matter if everyone blocks it out using filtering that won't even d/l SPAM from the server. REGARDLESS of whether or not YOU block out SPAM, its still stealing from YOU. Because your ISP's have to devote huge amounts of their resources to sending SPAM around, they put the tab on your bill. Furthermore, its still slowing down the Net at large, and ultimately you, whether or not you download it. This is my proposal:
PREAMBLE: Any violations of these statutes can result in jail time and severe fines paid to the state, the individual harmed, and the individual's ISP. The following proposal applies, unless otherwise stated, to E-MAIL, FAX, and the TELEPHONE. SPAM in all of these areas SHIFTS almost ALL of the cost of advertising from the ADVERTISER, to US and OUR ISP.
(1) What's needed is an OPT IN ONLY system. ONLY people who OPT IN get sent stuff from organizations.
(2) Furthermore, the OPT IN should have to be exclusive; opting in to receive e-mail from IBM NEVER gives them the right to let their "partners" send you crap. If they want to let their partners send you crap, they should have to contact you, explaning which partners they want you to let send you stuff, and what those partners do. Misrepresentation of this information should be considered a violation.
(3) Unsolicited solicitations encouraging people to OPT IN are SPAM themselves. That is, if some organization (i.e., bigdicks.com) sends you an unsolicited "one time" request to "opt in" -- irrelevant whether that request is text-only or not -- its SPAM and a violation.
(4) That said, the only legal way to propose to someone that they opt-in would be if they went to your website (and you had an opt-in option on your site) or requested information from you on opting in and you sent it to them. BUT, such opt-in options MUST state how large the OPT-IN proposal is in KB or MB accurate to 99%.
(5) Any Opt-in proposals (either on the website or ones send by e-mail/fax/phone) must state the following about the commercial communication that consumers are opting into. (1) How frequently they send their communications, or on what bases [i.e., is it once every month? Or does it go by "whenver there's news"?] (2) How large is the average communication that is sent, plus or minus standard deviation? (3) Opt-in proposals must also state accurately what the communication sent is about. Intentional or unintentional misrepresentation of ANY of these pieces of information is a violation.
(6) Said information in (5) must be updated at every new communication, correcting for that communication.
(7) All such solicited communications are to include clear removal instructions. In ALL cases, the option to remove MUST be presented such that the individual need only respond with REMOVE in the subject field. The removal must be immediate, or quick enough such that the individual gets no more communications from that entity.
(8) All such communications are to include an appropriate 3 letter header: Adv, Upd, or Nws. Adv applies for any commercial entity trying to sell you something. Upd applies for an update on a situation or software (i.e., an available upgrade). Nws applies for news (i.e., the stuff slashdot sends my e-mail).
(9) This law is not intented to cover the communications of private INDIVIDUALS, but ONLY of organizations.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
"Cracking the whip" means to work harder, as in produce more spam.
If we forwarded all our spam to them, wouldn't it mean that ... oh, but the FTC qualifies it as SOLICITED mail. I see...
I only hope this starts to work, because after 2 months I still get the same amount of spam and it is easier to delete it off my server than waste bandwidth downloading and forwarding it to someone else. What to do, what to do...
"Wireless : LAN
Howard Beale was the volatile news anchor in Network who exhorted his audience to "...go to the window, open it, stick your head out and yell":
I'm mad as hell, and I'm not not going to take this anymore!
I run an email reading service, where I charge $500 for reading spam sent to me after I advertise my business on USENET with a post that includes its unmunged email address. (It usually takes some detective work and litigation to collect the money.) If the government clamps down on this market, I will have to close my spam-reading sweatshop and all my hardworking employees will be out of a job. And this will certainly not have a good outcome for the American "consumer". (I don't know what that means but it sounds good, doesn't it?)
Why is the government intent on destroying the American businessman? This is nothing less than economic terrorism. Once I start making a comfortable living, the govermnent has the responsibity of making sure that I never have to change my business model. Isn't this in the Constitution or something?
I guess I have to send one of my $500 checks to Senator Fritz. That might buy me a bill that makes it illegal to have an email account that does not receive at least 200 federally approved unsolicited commercial emails per day. This would be great for my business and would help promote new markets.
if you give your annual donation to www.irs.gov then you DO pay for it...its just the money is finally going to something usefull.
"Hey, this way we don't have to spend our own money on fighting this problem!"
Where do you think the Feds get their money?
AFAIK, forging return addresses in email is a federal crime and possibly illegal in one or more states.
On some level (although I'm sure a SlashLawyer might disagree with me) it's the equivalent of wirefraud and I'd like to see the Feds going after that, number one on their list instead of cancer cures and other pesky things.
Lots of spam would just drop out of sight if those jerks had to include their real email address.
A message from our sponsor
'Carnivore' seems to be a very appropriate name for a tool to exterminate, or perhaps 'eat' SPAM. Of course, SPAM's meat status is debatable....
$ make work
make: *** No rule to make target `work'. Stop.
Seriously. I would love to work on the "task force" going after spammers. Who do I contact? The FTC? The FBI?
A while ago, I started receiving emails from Microsoft's home advisor web site. I think I visited their site a time or two to look at real-estate listings, but I never recall signing up for any type of email from them.
Anyway, each time, their messages say I can click on a link to change my preferences (so I no longer receive this email "newsletter"). I've tried this at least 4 times now, and still - I get spammed with more of their mail.
Now, honestly, I don't think a company the size of Microsoft is interested in purposely spamming people. (The negative press that would generate makes it a very bad idea.) Instead, I think their automated system for unsubscribing is just buggy/defective (or overloaded at the times I'm trying to use it).
...used to track e-mail to/from NORML members.
The thing about foreign scams, though, is that they are by nature limited in what they can do to/for you. The foreign scam I detail makes a number of ludicrous claims for their product (claims which are impossible for any product to fulfill, much less a piece of Visual BASIC bloatware being sold for three times what it's worth), but none of this will cause you any physical harm. You might lose your hard drive if the paranoid program decides you aren't a licensed user (the front man for the guys who put out the program is certifiable, often spewing paranoid and delusional rantings about anybody who has ever criticized his behavior or his program), but you aren't going up dead or anything. While I've heard that the FTC is investigating these particular people, I have mixed emotions about that. There's far worse scams out there, some of which could cause physical harm. Bilking the gullible for $100 beyond what the product is worth via deceptive claims and exaggerations is hardly my idea of a top priority for government enforcement -- going after the dangerous scams, or the ones that take people for all their lives savings, has to be top priority.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
so is spam the real reason north korea is being included in the governments "axis of evil"? i get most of mine from .kr domains.
Scam artists who run outright scams (as vs. the Herbalife sort who do sell a product, sorta, kinda) tend to be small fry by nature because if they get big enough to pull in megabucks, they attract regulators like a cow pattie attracts flies. The fact that the online scammers that the FTC is going after are all small fry is a product of the effectiveness of the FTC (and simple bad publicity) at handling outright scams -- bigger fry have already been smacked down.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
DMCA
I thought Carnivore was set loose to devour SPAM. Isn't SPAM a meat product?
Note to all replys -- Just a Yes or No will suffice! I don't really want to know what goes in SPAM (I took the Red pill god dammit...)
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
I've got the same problem with ZiffDavis, I am on some mailing list, and when I click the unsubscribe link I end up at a login page to change my prefs. Of course I have never signed up for this service and consequently have no user name and password to sign in to change the prefs. So I enter my email in the "duh, I forgot my name and password" field, the email they are sending stuff to, that is. It returns that I am not a registered member, "no shit", so why am I getting junk mail to this account in the first place
I don't think that they intend to be spammers without an opt out method, just that over time they have merged passive and active lists and there is no way for the passive victims to login to opt out
Yeh, I had the same problem with amazon.com a while back.. They had a contest where you enter your email address to win a ps2.
Now, once the contest was over, the email list turned into basically a ps2-buy-stuff-from-amazon.com email list..
So I clicked their unsubscribe link at the bottom.. which to took me to amazon and told me to login using my amazon.com login to change my prefs..
I had at that time never bought or done any business with amazon other than signing up for their ps2 contest, so obviously I had no amazon.com account to login with to change my prefs..
Finally after months of emailing practically everyone on their abuse team and customer support team (You get a new person answering every email), I got someone who was smart enough to understand the problem and remove me.
Please, think carefully before invoking Big Brother to solve your problems! As convenient as it sounds, federal regulation of e-mail provides yet another disturbing precendent for government control of private communication. It's disturbing how quickly the supposedly "lesse fair" Slashdot reader can forget his principles when the heavy hand of Uncle Sam is swinging in his favor.
Think about it. Defining "spam" is about as easy as defining "offensive" content. Subjective decisions about which e-mail messages are deemed worthy to be delivered should NOT be made by politicians in Washington, D.C., USA. If your people group doesn't like receiving certain types of e-mail, then it is YOUR responsibility to band together and do something about it.
There is are very obvious technical solutions to spam based around digital signatures. Think for a minute about the icon at the bottom of your browser, which informs you that an online merchant is "trustworthy" (i.e. their identity has been independently verified). It's not hard to see how this concept of "transitive trust" could be extended to e-mail, while preserving relative anonymity.
Basically, various groups could establish public-key databases containing validated e-mail signatures, and databases could transitively incorporate other databases, similar to DNS. (Most likely, keys would be issued to servers rather than to individuals.) Mail servers could then be configured to reject any e-mail which is not signed with a recognized key. A user could report spam to the approriate *local* group, and they could respond by reprimanding the sender or revoking the key. The definition of "spam" would be relative to a particular group. A similar scheme could be used for content regulation on web sites.
E-mail has been LONG overdue for incorporation of basic technologies like PGP. This is partly because of the perceived cost of implementation, but mainly because of apathy on the part of sysadmins. So, if you sysadmins are finally ready to take action, please do something more proactive than simply deferring to Uncle Sam or some other imperial authority.
-Gonz
The US gov. has been "cracking down on cybercrime!" for decades now,
but the only people they put in jail are the r3N3g4D3 h4x0r D00D$
are really just lost souls crying out for attention. (ha ha!)
It's not like they can or will do much.
Just like the stupid telemarketers, you can't outlaw phone calls,
and even if you do, who will really enforce it or report it?
I get at least 3 telemarketer calls at home,
and at least 10 unsolicited spams in my snotmail box every day.
It doesn't have anything to do with signing up for anything,
it's all about the Benjamins. Universities, businesses and
even governmental institutions buy and sell personal information
so they can direct marketing to your front door.
I've never bought anything from a telemarketer, or
on-line from a website ad, yet I still get crappy junk mail in
my snail and email boxes.
How? Simple.
Ex: #1
I get a Gillette razor in the mail from the Army when I turn 18.
Not because the Army is really concerned about me being clean shaven,
for all they know, I may have been struck bald as a child and their
gift becomes some sort of cruel joke. No, I get the razor, because Uncle Sam
wants some greenbacks from Gillette and just happens to have my
age, name and address. Gillette just happens to have a crapload of cheap
razors, and they want me to buy refills from them for the rest of my life.
Ex: #2
I go off to college, and start getting a ton of phone calls for credit cards
in my off-campus house. Is this because the previous occupant was a plastic
money hound? No, it's because the university has determined that my tuition and
the governments contribution combined are not enough to buy the provost's daughter
a new purple Jaguar.
Ex: #3
I go to a web site for a DSL company who's primary business is
"Direct" satellite "TV" (figure it out). I want to determine if DSL
is available in my area, and it asks for my phone number to check availability.
No checkboxes showing anything about "please bug the crap out of me while
I'm eating dinner", so I enter the number click go.
A few days later, I get a phone call from that "Direct" satellite "TV" company,
just to let me know that they are in the area, and they have a "special offer"
if I sign up now! Woo hoo!
Wait a minute, they've been "in the area" for a really long time,
and I never received a phone call before. Come to think of it, the
"special offer" is the same exact one they have on their web site.
Not so special after all, eh?
Ex: #4
I go to the grocery store, and they all of a sudden have these special "bonus"
cards that you can use to get money off on groceries. I sign up for one,
because it's free, and all they're going to do is jack the price up anyways
so that suckers without a card will have to pay extra.
A week later, surprise surprise I start getting grocery advertising and coupon
clipping junk mail at my brand new house.
So it's about damn time the government started smacking the advertising
spam whores with some fines instead of paying them to spam you.
Maybe I'll only get 1 "FREE HOT XXX PORN!" email per day instead of 10.
-Dave
Enforcement would of course be tricky (as if enforcement of tax laws isn't already tricky enough!). Besides the obvious tax havens like offshore operation, you'd have to define "mass mailing" carefully so that separate mailings of essentially the same content would be counted as the "same" mass mailing for tax purposes. And that might get you into Free Speech complications. But at least it would be a step in the right direction...
Hey, by placing these addresses on a public site like /., they are likely to get harvested by the spammers...
/dev/null. I think I'll change the alias to uce@ftc.gov and auto-forward them all.
Not likely. All but the most half-assed of spammers will filter their list to remove *@*.gov, webmaster@*, postmaster@*, abuse@*, root@*, and so on.
But alias processing will not be detected.
I have a number of non-accounts that somehow got onto spammer lists - probably due to somebody mis-filling-out forms - that are currently aliased to
I HAD been thinking about forwarding it to the congresscritters' emails. But this might actually get some response.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Law enforcement agencies routinely get around that sort of things as follows:
Fish with an illegal wiretap, until you find something interesting.
Call in an "anonymous tip" to the guy at the next desk.
Get a warrant for the interesting thing on the basis of the "anonymous tip from a usually reliable source".
Put in the "legal" wiretap. Or just break in and sieze some evidence. (And if you can't find any but you REALLY don't like the guy, or don't want your own butt in a sling, plant a little.)
While I don't know if the FBI is doing any of that these days, they have a long history of doing it that has been repeatedly exposed. (Of course you ALWAYS have only the old stuff that was exposed - because the current stuff hasn't been exposed yet. So there's no real way to tell whether an agency has finally cleaned up its act and stayed clean, except by discovering much later that it hadn't.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Whatever happened to the federal bill to extend the anti-unsolicited-FAX law to spam?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
We cannot depend on the United States government alone to stop spammers since more and more spam is coming from overseas. Remember all those recent bits about so much spam coming from China that ISP's are starting to reject all mail from China?
The real solution would be to improve technology to make spam much more difficult. For instance, the open relay lists are a good start.
The United States government cannot govern those in other countries.
I've had fun with spammers this week - a company (ancestry.com, aka myfamily.com) that was once legitimate seems to have hired several Direct Email Marketing Companies to promote them, using companies who do the dishonest "you must have opted-in somehow" strategy but using their own servers and leaving real addresses on them. I've emailed Myfamily.com's venture capitalists, and their PR department, and at least one of the spammer companies sent me back a note about "I'm sorry, we seem to have bought a bad list of names from ____ and we're getting tons of complaints, we'll put you on our block list right away", and in fact I haven't gotten any more mail from that spamhaus. Now to beat up the next one's ISPs...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Laws against cracking machines on the internet have more effect - remember the userfriendly.org This Is Not A Denial-Of-Service Attack? Fortunately or unfortunately, it's not legal to treat most US-based spammers appropriately :-) It may be legal in the US to treat Korean spammers appropriately, but most of the entertaining techniques violate your ISP's Acceptable Use Policies to a much larger extent than SPAM does.
So that means you're stuck playing by the rules - contacting spammers' ISPs, contacting their customers (for the commercial spammers), contacting their customers' ISPs. For US-based spammers, you may have grounds for a small-claims lawsuit. Even if it's tough to make your "$200 price for evaluating potential-spam email messages" bill get paid, you may be able to find some excuse to sue them, and Small Claims Court is inexpensive for you and may cost them travel costs, may let you do discovery to get their customer lists and the lists of vendors who sold them your address (if they didn't harvest it themselves), and enough rounds of getting thrown off ISPs and dragged into 1000 cities' local courts can really get somebody's attention.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Spam bad mmmmmkay?
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
I only got three instead of the usual 20-30...
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
... with the April Fools Jokes already!
Yeah, you can stop SPAMMING!
Is that because they don't want the government to know that they are breaking the law? Why don't you spammers put your real information in the SPAM, is that because you don't want your mother to be ashamed of you?
I also forward the Copy any DVD spam to the MPAA.
Mattel v. Free Speech
Mattel tries to take down site about computer injuries.