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FTC Sues Six in Spam E-Mail Round-Up
TamMan2000 writes "This story over at Yahoo makes it look like the federal government is going after some spammers with gusto... Although they seem to be busting them for fraud via spam rather than just the fact that they spam, it is still good to see them going after them. Also interesting, it looks like one of the things they are nailing them for is the fraudulent 'remove me from your mailing list' that actually brings more spam."
Remember, Capone was busted for tax evasion -- not for his worst crimes. Get 'em any way you can.
Of course the federal government is going after spammers. The Direct Marketing Assoc. just recently changed their position on spam because people were so sick of it that the DMA members' "legitimate" ads weren't getting through. I think the DMA screwed themselves, though: By preventing legislation against sending spam, they forced the spam victims to invent better ways of avoiding it at the receiving end. Those methods are now doing a wonderful job of killing the DMA's crap.
It could never be made illegal...simply because it's a form of unwanted advertising. Ever take a trip on the highway and seen all the billboards? I don't like the way that the billboards cover up the country side. I think that billboards are a physical equivilent of email spam......see my point?
--CypherDragon
There's a funny old Irish law that still holds in one of the counties making it legal for an Irishman to kill a Scotsman provided the Scot is wearing a kilt at the time...
My favourite is one from Aus (Newcastle) where beating a rug on the front lawn of your house is punishable by public flogging. I find the fact it's still [technically] law amusing but the thing that gets me chuckling is that there was a time when people beating rugs on their front lawns was such a problem they had to pass that law to make them stop... funny world.
Now if you gave a spammer 1 lash for every spam you'd soon have, well, less spammers I guess...
(Mr Spammer sir, I'd like you to meet my good friend here - the Lash'o'matic, which will be administering the first million of your 250 million lashes...)
It's not that I'm Anti-American - I'm Pro-Freedom
Download my list of spammers, which is updated every day or so: /etc/firewall/blacklisted_nets and run a bash script:
/etc/firewall/blacklisted_nets`
http://enthalpy.homelinux.org/spammers.txt
Then dump it in
for I in `cat
do
echo Blacklisting Spammer: $I/23
iptables -A INPUT -s $I/23 -j REJECT
done
It puts a drag on the spammer's system as they try to send mail to you for 5 days or so before their mail server finally gives up and decides your domain is not reachable.
Of course you need to have your own domain to do this, but with Linux and free Dyn-DNS services, this is not a problem. And it WORKS!
The only way the FTC can go after spam is for fraud and other things already illegal. It's not illegal simply to advertise via email (yet, anyway). They're doing the best they can with the rules that they're allowed to govern in.
:)
At least they are one division of government that doesn't try to overstep its bounds
josh
hookers and grits.
Billboards actually have been outlawed. The only reason they're still around is because the ones that were already in place have been grandfathered.
Just seems a little strange considering Yahoo sells it's subscribers off to spammers after promising "Yahoo for life!" and offering a spam filter (ya right) :) Also for 2 years every email I sent to my friends had a little advertisement for Yahoo which could be considered spam then they decided to charge for the service they promised free.
Yahoo? My ass!!!!
I'm really suprised that spam-busting hasn't become a bigger political issue. There realyl isn't a large pro-spam lobby, and any senator/rep who campaigned against spam ("I'm going to ban spam! Vote for me") would pick up not only a lot of techie votes, but votes from the general population as well - there isn't really a pro-spam segment of the population, either.
Issues like this, which a few people (the spammers) act against almost everyone else's intrests are ripe for conventional political action... why hasn't it happened yet? Granted, there are examples at the state level, and they have run into legal hurdles, but I'm really suprised we havn't seen federal legislation yet - it seems like an easy way to pick up votes.
Punishing the company advertising is problematic. Let's say I want to put one of my competitor's out of business... what's to stop me from hiring someone to flood the internet with ads in their name?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Next door to my friends grandparents lived the bo family. Kim Bo was the oldest son, sorta suffered from PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and had lived in his parents house well into his 40's.
:)
Nice enough guy, when we were teens he let us put a bunch of carp in his nasty green algea swimming pool. We spent the summer getting high, learning guitar rifts, and fishing for carp in our backyard fishing hole.
Well, eventually, his dad, the glue that was holding it all together died so his brothers and sisters wanted to sell the house and divide up the inheretance. Kim took his 150k share, bought a van, and spent the next 2 years living in his van, driving around playing music and doing odd jobs. It's not like he couldn't have gone and gotten a place, but at 40 this was what he decided to do with his life..
One day he got an e-mail "NIGERIAN OFFICIAL NEEDS HELP IN FUNDS TRANSFERS" or some shit like that. I saw him in person one day and he asked me if it was a scam. From all the stuff on slash I had read I knew it was.. But the promises in the e-mails were just too good for him to pass up.
The scammers had him convert everything to a cashiers check, then had him fly to amsterdam in person to deliver the check. He flew halfway across the world thinking there was going to be some big payoff for helping these people..
3 months later he hasn't seen a dime or heard from the people. He got screwed out of 150k in just one moment of handing over a check..
I know most smart people wouldn't fall for this, their "SCAM ALERT" alarm would go off in their heads. The sad thing is these people prey on people not of sound mind, the elderly, the lonely. To say, "Oh they should have known better" just doesn't fit because the MO of these scammers takes them directly to these types of people.
Kim Bo is doin alright. He had to sell his bass guitar, which he loved dearly and some other music stuff. He's doing odd jobs to keep gas in the van and food in his belly but at his age in his mental condition the outlook isn't going to be so bright in another 10 years.
Before someone suggest he goes to the FBI, well he's done that already, but the FBI told him there's not much they can do. Kinda sucks we got them goin on these wild Osama Bin Laden goose chases because the frequency of these scams seem to be increasing.
I hope the FTC nails these fuckers to the wall. Hopefully they'll be in the same cell as nasty nate and really get what they deserve
Make that two Yeeeaaahhh's!!!
Your friend could also probably switch her email account, but that's beside the point.
I will pretty much only ever click one of those things if I honestly remember signing up it, in which case it's rarely spam and usually from a company with a reputation to protect.
On the other hand I have a few messages that I get routinely that I haven't quite figured out how to filter out. The entertaining thing about one... a bunch of crappy boiler plate quasi content and one link... a link that sez 'remove me,' talk about an email harvester if I ever saw one. They're selling something but give you no way to respond (different email every time), they aren't even trying to appear legit.
This behavior makes it impossible for people like that spam-queen they had on WSJ the other day (yesterday?) to claim legitimacy. The 'Remove me' links don't work as a rule so claiming people can always opt out of their list is like saying you can avoid getting mugged by putting a big sign on your back, "please don't rob me, I'm carrying a lot of cash and now would be a bad time to lose it". If you're genuinely dealing with a well intentioned mugger it might help, but usually it only makes things worse.
Some spammer took a random address from one
of my domains to use as a return address. I was suddenly getting hundreds of bounced spam per hour
I had the same thing happen to me.
First of all I asked the site being promoted in the spam [one of the erotica.com group] to please stop forging addresses at my domain.
Nothing changed -- not even an acknowledgement.
So I started forwarding all the bounces to support@erotica.com and their domain contact address domadmin@aeroweb.com
Nothing changed.
Then I started also started forwarding the bounces to affiliates of erotica.com.
Nothing changed
Then I contacted the upstream provider and asked them to shut down the intermediary site (one of their clients) that was being directly referenced in the spam.
Nothing changed, not even an acknowledgement.
So their abuse address was added to the list of those receiving the bounces.
Over a period of three days, nearly 9,000 bounce messages were received and forwarded to the parties involved.
No doubt they were filtering these bounces -- but what else can you do in such a situation?
The spammers don't care that they're screwing up someone's email system by forging return addresses and the upstream provider (pnap.net) is obviously also a blackhat in league with the devil.
If people think it's annoying getting 30-60 spams a day, imagine what it's like getting 3,000 unwanted email bounces per day due to the sleazy activites of spammers!
On a side note, why aren't ISPs taking a more proactive approach in stopping spam? I remember here a while ago that people were bitching because Verizon blocked all tcp port 25 except to their servers. This should help dramatically in stopping spam as Verizon can then detect it at their server. People here cried about it. If you want to use your SMTP server at work then use a VPN. It is unfortunate but there has to be tighter controls to stop spam at the ISP it originates from.
One of the more interesting examples of this sort of bigotry was the motive behind the creation of universal publicly funded education in the United States.
This happened as large numbers of Irish came to the country, and was a result of anti-Catholic bigotry. The purpose was to undercut the Catholic school system. The result was the pathetic school system we now have.
The only good weather is bad weather.
What I do with those remove links is traceroute them to find the level one ISP and then add some e-mail addresses from their level 1 (like the NOC address from ARIN). Some of the spammers are undoubtedly clever enough to filter those out, but I'll bet most of them are too stupid. I started doing this a few weeks ago and I've been seeing a lot less spam lately....
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us