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."

Comments

Get them any way you can.

[trentfoley]

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.

Remember, Capone was busted for tax evasion -- not for his worst crimes. Get 'em any way you can.

Re:Good

[Dragon213]

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?

Firewall em

[vandan]

Download my list of spammers, which is updated every day or so:
http://enthalpy.homelinux.org/spammers.txt
Then dump it in /etc/firewall/blacklisted_nets and run a bash script:

for I in `cat /etc/firewall/blacklisted_nets`
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!

Why not a political issue?

[mlknowle]

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.

Re:i want strong spam laws

[El]

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?

Long time friend just got scammed

[t0qer]

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 :)

Re:Some good out of my forwards

[NewtonsLaw]

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!