Slashdot Mirror
Russian Minister Gets Spammed, Spams Back
elhim writes "According to an article in the Moscow Times: 'Spammers last week got on the wrong side of the wrong man, and quickly found themselves with a taste of their own medicine. The man? Deputy Communications Minister Andrei Korotkov. Tired of the endless spate of unsolicited messages that clog e-mail systems everywhere, [Korotkov and others devised] ...an audio message to be volleyed nonstop to the telephone numbers listed in the... [email] spam messages.' Sometimes Russia reminds me of the Wild West."
Wasn't there an article some months ago about something simimlar happenning in china? 'Entrepreneurs' would illegally put up advertisements (i.e. posters) all over the place where you have to phone a number to get the product. (Typically these would be mobile phone numbers that were prepaid so there was no name on the account.)
The law enformenet officials would leave an endless loop of messages on tht moble's answering machine that they must turn themselves in and such. I doubt that they actually expected anyone to turn themselves in, but it made all those posters with the number on them useless and thus discouraged putting them up in the first place.
I wonder if this russian fellow was inspired by that action.
Yes and no. Spam almost never contains valid automatible contact information for the Spammer, but the Advertiser absolutely has to have some way of being contacted. It's hard work chasing spammers, so there's my usual anti-spam technique - piss off as many "Spammer Customers" as I can. I appear to have been removed from spam lists several times just for hassling a few CEOs...
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
1. That **ing American English Center send out its REAL phone numbers. It's Runet's curse for months now - all civilized attempts to get them down failed. They change mails everyday writing something like 'Tsent rAmerican sko goAngliy skogo' instead of 'Tsentr Americanskogo Angliyskogo' or 'Amer icanEngli shCen ter' to get the filters fooled.
Still I don't expect broken windows, masked armed men in their office and Militia (our local police) officers showing them a prescription to 'clean out' from there... It is a dream of almost everybody here, but it is not going real any day.
And their management which is 'very far, too far from here to get phone calls' - these people seem to be just insane i-net villains, striving not for business, but to 'show these Russian swines' who is the king of the hill around.
2. Read the article more accurately: even Andrey Korotkov had to confirm: that resounding measure didn't bring much good. God or not, but the problem remains.
It probably doesn't make a huge difference these days, as most spam seems to be HTML email embedded with webbugs (1x1 image tag pointing at a logging script) so they know your address is valid as soon as you open the email if your client renders HTML. It's still a good idea not to reply, but it's a better idea not to open it in the first place.
In this case though, the article was about calling phone numbers listed in the spam, which if nothing else, at least increases the cost of doing business for the spammer. I'd imagine the parent poster was talking about the same, as email replies aren't likely to impose much of a burden on the spammer. It's a lot cheaper to glance at an email and hit shift-delete than to have an inbound phone circuit and operator tied up while somebody rants at them about the evils of spam.