Slashdot Mirror
Following the Spam Trail
An anonymous reader writes "MSNBC's Bob Sullivan doggedly follows a spam trail from Alabama to Argentina to find out who actually benefits from spam. The beneficiaries aren't necessarily the pasty faced, high school drop out industrial spammers we have gotten to know, but well known companies."
If you look towards the bottom of the MSNBC page linked in the story, there is a form that allows you to submit your spam stories, which asks for your name, hometown, phone number and e-mail address. Now what does MSNBC need with that information, in relation to your experiences with spam? Seems fishy to me...
The beneficiaries aren't necessarily the pasty faced, high school drop out industrial spammers we have gotten to know, but well known companies.
Wow, like we hadn't figured that out already.
All commercial advertising, SPAM included, benefits companies.
Individual spammers are just pawns like their more respectable counterparts in the legitemate marketing industry.
The unofficial
Greetings,
We need a vendor who can offer immediate supply.
I'm offering $5,000 US dollars just for referring a vender which is (Actually RELIABLE in providing the below equipment) Contact details of vendor required, including name and phone #. If they turn out to be reliable in supplying the below equipment I'll immediately pay you $5,000. We prefer to work with vendor in the Boston/New York area.
1. The mind warper generation 4 Dimensional Warp Generator # 52 4350a series wrist watch with z80 or better memory adapter. If in stock the AMD Dimensional Warp Generator module containing the GRC79 induction motor, two I80200 warp stabilizers, 256GB of SRAM, and two Analog Devices isolinear modules, This unit also has a menu driven GUI accessible on the front panel XID display. All in 1 units would be great if reliable models are available
2. The special 23200 or Acme 5X24 series time transducing capacitor with built in temporal displacement. Needed with complete jumper/auxiliary system
3. A reliable crystal Ionizor with unlimited memory backup.
4. I will also pay for Schematics, layouts, and designs directly from the manufature which can be used to build this equipment from readily available parts.
If your vendor turns out to be reliable, I owe you $5,000.
Email his details to me at: info@federalfundingprogram.com
Please do not reply directly back to this email as it will only be bounced back to you.
Anyone else get this one? =P
Free music from Jack Merlot.
how many "middle men" are in the typical spam food chain, playing the percentages. Extra bonuses for network names, IP addys, hosting providers, etc. And also, why don't these large companies have the balls to just do it directly, themselves? /me thinks they are much like the Wizard of Oz, in this regard.
C|N>K
But seriously, does anyone here actually think people will care enough to boycott these companies?
I'm becoming more and more convinced that the only effective way to fight back is to spam the spammers. Not via email, but via their customer databases. Take the example of from this article: the spammers get paid for every lead they generate. But, if just 1% of the people who got the spam went to the site and *lied* about their identity, and their interest, the value of the list containing their info would go down so much as to make it worthless. Even if .1% of the people did this, it would dramatically reduce the value of such customer lists. That's the only way to stop spam, from what I can see: make it no longer economically viable.
According to the story, it seems like MSNBC was responsible for the termination of at least three business relations between "Legitimate" companies and spammers.
If only more news outlets traced their spam the same way, it could put a dent in the demand for spam.
Who am I kidding? Those spammers, er "lead generators" will go right back to work, selling to anyone who will buy, no questions asked. As long as businesses will pay for personal information, there will be plenty of weasels to sell it to them.
and it's always about the money...ank
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
No, and it would be dangerous if there were.
The inhibiting factor for most is simply the risk of being blackholed by the rest of us if they do.
Sadly there are a few that have such a huge chunk of the net under their thumb they are basically immune to this threat. I think that's the number two contributor to the spam problem (number one being fools that buy from spamvertisers.)
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
as this was a a mortage related spam - aka respectable spam - as opposed to the unrespectable spam like "enlarge ..." spam, it is not too off track to show how the big corporations are lobbying for the ability to send spam directly rather than thru these layers ...
It is also very interesting that the big companies like Microsoft are paying lobbyists for laws that shall allow them to send spam, on the pretext that if only their spam is identified as spam it is no longer spam. I might give my email id to a Microsoft division, and then without my permission it is available to all the divisions of microsoft - even if I have no interest in all their products save one for which I gave my email - so isn't all the unrelated email they send me now spam ???
What the big companies want to do is to send spam themselves, but prevent others from sending it. All knowing that spam is dirt cheap tool for sales, but there is only so much spam a consumer can take before the backlash hurts all spammers ...
it is pure and simple application of game theory - when it becomes lucrative enough for the politicians, they will step into it too ...
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
The article describes how "affiliates" get paid for supplying information gleaned from people who respond to spam e-mails.
This suggests that the economics of spamming could be disrupted rather easily if large numbers of folks would helpfully supply the information that the spammers seek.
Think about it. What would happen if every time a slashdotter got a spam, he responded with all the personal information (randomized, of course) that the spammer requested? The article used the example of a web form that the spamee was invited to fill in with his mortgage information.
A perl script could generate a lot of fills to the web form in a short period of time.
In the short term, affiliates would make extra money by selling truckloads of (phony) personal information. But within a few monthes, the large companies that pay for that information would wise up. That's when the spam economy would start to suffer.
This strategy is only interesting to those of us that have good spam filters in place. I'm getting very good results with bogofilter now. I believe that I could "survive" the major spam wave that would result if I employed this strategy. But this strategy would be a lot more effective if I had some company.
Registrant Organization: Zonda Sistemas S.A..
Address: Callao 1253
City: Postal Buenos Aires
Postal Code: 1024
Country: Argentina
Telephone: 4803-3824
Fax: 4803-3824
Main Activity: Systems
Responsible Person: Alberto Meyer Robert
Address: Callao 1253
City: Postal Buenos Aires
Postal Code: 1024
Country: Argentina
Telephone: 4803-3824
Hour Contact: 10-18
Date of recording: 20/01/2003
Organization Administrator: Zonda Sistemas S.A..
Address: Callao 1253
City: Buenos Aires
Postal Code: 1024
Country: Argentina
Telephone: 4803-3824
Fax: 4803-3824
Main Activity: Systems
Tecnicnal Contact: Alberto Meyer Robert
Address: Callao 1253
City: Buenos Aires
Postal Code: 1024
Country: Argentina
Telephone: 4803-3824
Hour Contact: 10-18
Fax: 4803-3824
Servants of Name of Dominion
Primary Servant of Names:
Name: ns.super-zonda.com
Direction IP:
Secondary servant of Names:
Name: ns1.super-zonda.com
Direction IP:
Third Servant of Names:
Name: ns2.super-zonda.com
Direction IP:
Fourth Servant of Names:
Name: ns3.super-zonda.com
Direction IP:
personal note - i kinda like the sound of 'Primary Servant of Names' over 'name server one'.
There is a utility called FormFucker which spams web forms.
It analyzes the web form and then makes 1000s of submissions using realistic-looking but fake names, addresses, zip codes, telephone numbers, credit card numbers, etc.
Note that use of FF is very controversial, as many consider it fighting-abuse-with-abuse.
I think this is a problem more to be blamed on clueless sys-admins than organizations like SPEWs. Remember, it is the sys admin, not the the black hole who is choosing to accept the message.
People who filter based on spews and others alike basically don't care about getting a 1%-10% of false positives. To an individual that might be cool, but try setting up that policy in your workplace server.
I have my filters based on spamhaus, blitzed and dsbl. The analysis, done by sgifford was a real eye opener. I recommend it to anybody in charge of running a realiable server with black list filtering enabled.
My other OS is the MCP!
Noticeably absent is any mention of Microsoft's support of spam, including their spammer-for-hire subsidiary, bCentral.com
Listbuilder is one of the worst at harvesting email addresses from any source they can get their hands on.
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
I'd started building an anti-spam site (I was going to call it "Spamintology") and I was planning to launch it with the number up front, suggesting that people call her to tell her what a bad boy her son was.
But I didn't. Because after the visions of glory, I had visions of my own mother's phone ringing off the hook as spammers called her to complain about me. And that's when I cancelled my plans for the site.
These spammers are often criminals, and always scumbags. If you really start to hurt them, hit them where they live, you risk them trying to hurt you back. That's why I decided to abandon my crusade, because I wasn't so altruistic as to put myself and my family in the line of virtual fire for the sake of zinging Spamford.
Some spam will be stopped by current anti-spam laws under proposal, but the only way to truly stop spam is going to be to take it out of the hands of the FTC and put it into the hands of the FBI. Spam will slow when we see spammers on the evening news, walking into federal courthouses to defend themselves against RICO charges like John Gotti.
If we put together an FBI Anti-Spam unit on par with the FBI's Organized Crime unit at its height, we'd see spam decrease and the nightly news would be entertaining again... for a while.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic