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Spammers Busted
Scud_the_disposable_ writes "CNN has posted an article about the "shutting down" of several spammers who sell fake international driver's licenses. These licenses are supposed to win back suspended driving priviledges, and make holders immune to speeding tickets and other traffic violations." What makes me even more sad is that people fell for it. So far today is a slow spam day for me. Only 81 spam, but its only 9:30.
They weren't actually busted for spamming.
Ok, it's good the FTC is cracking down on illegal/fradulent product spammers. But that still leaves all the spammers who are selling legitimate products (such as all that refinancing crap, I suppose that could be real), and then what about all the spammers from overseas? And the US ones will find a way to base their operations overseas should the need arise. What about sending them from the middle of the ocean in International waters?
We still gotta fix the Internet mail system. It would probably take the support of *shudder* Microsoft in an upcoming version of Windows to affect a major change like that. Or a saavy small company with good PR/marketing.
Why should we be happy when the spammers get spammed? Ponder this.
Lex Talionis, the principle of an eye for an eye, is a morally bankrupt code of law we've been moving away from for the past few thousand years, thankfully. It can't deal with the complexities of the modern legal order, and it ignores all proper justifications for systems of punishment: rehabilitation, prophylaxis, etc. It makes an assertion of rigid judgment in an attempt to avoid judgment itself. We can't live in a world without judgment.
Ask yourself this: should we rape the rapist? If not, why not? (Ignore for a moment that we essentially do rape rapists by committing them to so-called "maximum security" prisons where they get systematically brutalized and raped by guards and other inmates.) It's not a morally tenable position to lower ourselves to the level of brutes just so we can vindicate some idea of retribution.
Therefore, ask yourself why we should be happy when the spammer gets spammed? No one should have to endure the pain and annoyance of spam: it's the scurge of the online world. Not even the spammer, who may be in his business because of factors outside his control like debt or bills for an illness in the family, etc. We should be outraged when anyone is spammed, and we should put the full force of the state and the law against the perpetrator no matter who the victim! Picking and choosing among which victims to protect is something the legal order of former barbaric times did. I'd be disgusted if our government returned to those days.
Spam == bad. Victimization == bad. Why do people conflate the two? What kind of giddy moral superiority to you get from seeing anyone hurt?
Sheesh, 81 spam e-mails so far today? I guess I really don't appreciate how much of a problem this is for American's, especially the ones who have been around for a while with the same address.
My e-mail address tends to change every 2-3 years. So far I've had this new one about 5 months perhaps, and only get one spam e-mail every week or so. Of course, I don't know how much of this is because my ISP is doing its part to stop spam.
Nevertheless, this sounds like a small victory. Unless I misunderstand...
for shutting them down.
It's the fact that the advanced driving licences these guys sell enable free citizens to drive around freely, throwing down the chains of the goverment. All these driving restrictions are just irrational restrictions installed by the goverment to ban people form exercizing their human right the drive anywhere they want and how faster ever they want.
It's no coincidence that after 9/11 the number of driving restrictions raised by 236.7 percent, even after the increase of 37.89 percent when Bush became president.
Such laws are just there to get people used to a climate of restriction and oppression where the goverment can do anything they want. In Soviet Russia for example only 50 mph of the streets where allowed and for driving more then 80 miles any from your hometown you needed a special passport.
Does this ring a bell ? Ashcuft anyone ?
Sorry, but this "spam" argument in this case is just another goverment scam to fool people like the moon landing and the SDI system.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
I whould sell the following service:
Choose the sex of you future child, money back guarentie.
FRA: STFU GTFO
There's really less realistic spam around than "stealth" driving licences... I mean, the people I'm really worried about are those who fall for someone selling them pills that will (all at one time):
1) Stop aging
2) Increase their IQ
3) Increase the size of their penis
4) Make them earn more money NOW
Now the people who fall for that are really in need of psychiatric assistance, and there must be some or the spammers wouldn't bother.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
Your penis size is directly proportional to the amount of spam you receive.
sh
"[A] high IQ is like a Jeep; you will still get stuck, just farther from help!" --Just d' FAQs, c.g.a
Many people throw away money like these irrevocable drivers license, Nigerian bank scams, the stock market bubble.
The people doing this are trying to cheat, and beat the system, playing games they don't quite understand.
They deserve to lose their money.
If you try to steal millions from the people of Nigeria, I hope you DO lose your money.
If you want to get an irrevocable license so you can keep drinking and driving and killing people I hope you lose your money (among other penalties).
If you go and throw every penny you have at some complex financial system you can't possibly understand hoping to make a quick buck, you get what you deserve.
People need to take responsiblity for their own actions.
That being said, fraud isn't acceptable and should be punished. But a reasonable person should be able to tell these are scams.
What we need is a Fox TV show about this!
'Spam-Busters', naturally with a theme copying Ghostbusters.
I for one know I'd spend at least 3 hours a day watching people sift through IP addresses and make phone calls!
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
So far today is a slow spam day for me. Only 81 spam, but its only 9:30.
You need to work smarter, not harder, Taco. I'm sure that if you apply yourself, you can come up with, say, a Perl script to send hundreds, or even thousands of spam by 0900 each and every day...
In walking, just walk. In sitting, just sit. Above all, don't wobble.
-- Yun-Men
You just don't protect your email address. I have had my current one for over two years and I have never recieved a single piece of spam? How? Never post that address on the internet, and never give it to a company when you register for something and you'll find that you don't have a problem.
Anyone know of efforts to stop spammers by pestering them with nuisance suits that they have to defend? Could work, at least until they move abroad.
Or we could just burn them for fuel.
---
We have just released 2 Million freshly extracted Canadian email addresses.
Just for this week, you can download these for only US$29!
Now you can send emails to only people who reside in Canada.
To order yours, please fill in the form below and email it back to ***********@btamail.net.cn
Make sure you put "ORDER" in the SUBJECT line.
---
(addressed blanked out, I don't want to send them more business!)
I know I've sent tonnes of complaints to the ISPs involved with btamail (though SpamCop), but I wonder if there's a more direct or effective approach... especially since I'm certain they're pimping out *MY* E-mail address in their "freshly extracted" batch.
Yeah. I'm bitter.
Provided they use only their own resources (i.e. they do not tax other people's hardware and bandwidth) and are regulated the same way that all other marketters are regulated. This means they can't "hide" themselves behind forged headers or other information designed to deceive the reader/recipient.
After that, they become a legitimate marketting force. Of course I don't expect SPAM to survive in such an environment, but I think it should be legal under those conditions.
I thought for sure, with as much spam as you get, you'd be the first one to try out the bayesian mail filters that Paul Graham wrote about. One of the ones he suggested was CRM114 With a reputed catch rate of 99.8%, do you really not want to try it that much?
We will probably always be stuck with spam.
...and then we find people who believe they can buy a drivers' license that'll reinstate their revoked one and make them immume to speeding tickets.
I keep looking at it and saying, "Who buys this stuff? Who's so stupid to buy stuff from a spammer?" I look at it and wonder how spamming could possibly be profitable.
As P.T. Barnum said, there's a sucker born every minute, and I get the feeling if he were around today, he'd find lots of money in spam...
OK, I have to ask: what the heck are you guys doing with your email addresses that make you get 81 spam messages before noon? Publishing it on a billboard in Times Square? I've had my current email for 3 months. I don't get ANY spam. And I'm a guy whose used that address at Amazon, Drugstore.com, Yahoo, eBay, and a million other places. The only place I haven't used it is on Usenet.
The only email account I have that gets spam is my Hotmail account. I call this my "slutty" email because it's the one I use when I KNOW providing an email address will give me spam.
An international drivers license is usually only issued on the basis of having a _valid_ national license. Here in the UK you must take a valid UK license to the Post Office (or the AA) to get an International License.
It is also not valid for the country of issue, and I'm betting most insurance companies won't accept one when insuring your vehicle. So basically, I'd need some form of valid foreign license to get an international license that I could use in the USA, and even then I'd be driving without insurance, which I know is illegal in most if not all states.
So I don't see why anyone should fall for this scam...
-- "...I'm a bad guy because I, well, I sing some rock-and-roll songs." M. Manson
okay, this is slightly off-topic, but I just got this email spam, and it conforms to the Nigerian spam formula -- but look at the reason!
...Shortly before her death on 31 August 1997, Princess Diana became an ardent and effective crusader against landmines. She gave numerous... ...In 1997, we opened an account with a security company in the United State of America and we make a deposit of twenty million pounds that was realized from a landmine campaign in Angola and Bosnia. ....
At least they are making it mildly interesting. I, for one, though, am still convinced that the Nigerian spam's popularity is because it is used to fund Al Qaida's "exterminate non-muslims" campaign, but I wouldn't ever be able to prove it.
But that would also explain the jump in Nigerian spam that I seem to get at different times.
---CONCENTRATED EXTRACT OF SPAM BELOW---
I am Andrew Purkis, chief executive of the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund.
Diana, Princess of Wales, devoted herself to a host of domestic and international issues, such as disadvantaged children, the homeless, HIV/Aids, and landmines...
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Dam! I just lost my 375 bucks!
Well, going to take my herbal viagra know...
Since my ISP started using Postini I only get one or two, and as soon as they catch one the rest of the same type are blocked. I can still log into the message center where the suspicious messages are held, and review them just in case. I'd never heard of it before then, and have no interest in the company other than paying .50/month for extra spam filtering.
DIY hack for Orange smartphone revealed
And discovered that most of the ads for porn sites are genuine.
I've also discovered that I could increase the size of my... you know what... for only $49. Who says spam's not useful?
--- My dad's political betting
If you have a US driver's license, you can get an international driver's license just by going to your nearest AAA office, filling out a form, and paying a small fee. You then get a little booklet you have to carry around with your regular license, which basically amounts to a bunch of pages that say "this is a driver's license" in several languages.
Increase your penis size by 2" to 3"!
(If my penis grew 1 mm for every add I had recieved I could have sex with people in other states, and not leave home
A business proposistion
Involves me paying them 10k and me getting nothing. Although the letter says I'll get either gold, or millions in cash. Somehow I don't believe them
I saw you bio on-line
I don't HAVE a bio on line, and no I don't want to look at your russian web cams
Re: Your computer has a virus
No, my computer is a linux machine, it doesn't have a virus and your bullshit copy of norton wouldn't help if it did
news,Married women await you!
Somehow I don't think my signifigant other cares. In fact if your married, and your trying to get me to cross state lines to have sex with you for money, isn't that illegal?
Add about 10 more messages to the list that got through(after spam assasin tagged and discared the usual slew). I still believe that the law should be changed so that myself, and a few close "friends" can introduce spammers to baseball bats. Only when you take the consequences out of the cyber world and bring it into the real world will SPAM start to slow down. Baseball bats are an excellent choice of a good "real world" consequence. Think I'm too harsh? then you have never had to administer a large mail server and deal with the "results" of spamming day in or day out.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
SPAM will lose it's ability to sell and be such a profitable enterprise once the majority of people currently using email move on to old age.
Think about it. The reason a SPAM'er can survive is because of people who just don't know any better. As soon as the younger generations take over, SPAM'ers will have a much harder fight to survive, to keep ahead of the legal system, and to just make any money.
The younger generations grew up knowing that an unsolicited email is not going to help you enlarge your male piece 10 fold, or your female pieces more perky or whatever. They know that the Nigerians begging for your help with their inheritances are a scam, just like everything else in their inbox. They won't buy into it.
Of course some people will buy into it, always. But this number of people will greatly diminish over the years until SPAM'ers have nothing left to do but find day jobs or report to the Unemployment Department with words such as 'I pissed people off for a living. Remember that evil SPAM thing that used to be so big? That was me'.
And as I said, they would need more bandwidth to tailor the From address on every message they sent. Way more. Right now they inject a single copy of the message with a long list of addresses in the "RCPT TO" SMTP command, and the relay owner eats the bandwidth. Customizing the From address would require the spammer to send one full copy of the message for each recipient. I'm guessing that's a 10x or 100x increase in bandwidth demands, maybe more.
More significantly, whitelist-approved From addresses will not scale to the proportions of spammers' mailing lists. It's one thing to scrape a million addresses from usenet, it's another to discover a whitelist-approved From address for every victim's address. This does not worry me one bit.
Als for mailing lists, they are addressed up front in the procmail script that implements my whitelist system. They get delivered before the whitelist gets examined. I'm on more lists than I can count, and I have yet to send a confirmation request to a list or to someone on a list. The only errors so far have been in the form of mailing list messages erroneously delivered to my daemon folder.
If someone can't be bothered to confirm a message, I can't be bothered to read their message. That is a feature, not a bug.
I look at it this way... How much spam am I willing to put up with in order to prevent friends from having to (gasp) send one extra message when they switch email addresses? Answer: none.
Build stuff. Stuff that walks, stuff that rolls, whatever.
Try registering for a domain name. You have to use a legitimate email address for that, and they are on public record. I got one or two a day until I registered for a domain. Now I get around 30 a day. Could be worse but still annoying.
I find that the spam filtering on Mac OS X's mail program is great, though. I believe that it uses Bayesian filtering as well, and now I only get the occasional email that slips through.
DHS (The Distributed Home Spamming DHS Club)
Ok, I did not know what this was, but as my servers are under a storm of port scans from Send-Safe send-safe and I was trying to find out some information I found this DHS DHS Web site Scary , who will be the first that Put them out?
Also it clear that they are using slow and bad admin's to run their "bizz." UUNET/Worldcom is the DHS Club's current Internet connectivity provider. They have a reputation of failing to aggressively enforce their posted Terms of Service.
Oh, why not drop the DHS members an E-mail E-mail address list
Are we losing the fight Spam software ??
I just hate bit SPAM, (www.netnoise.com.kh)
Surely, the point is you shouldn't need to obfuscate your email address when posting it in a public place, or to set up fake hotmail accounts.
For example, If I advertise sometime in the classifieds of the local paper I can put my real phone number and don't expect to get added to any direct mailing lists because of it.
If I put my real physical postal address on my web site I won't get inundated with extra junk mail.
But put your real email address anywhere on the web/internet and you start to receive spam in a very short time, the majority being for illegal items (if not they should be, e.g. fake univerity degrees) or things that are not applicable in the country I live (e.g. refinancing loans).
I copied this sig from someone else (but where did they get it from?)