Spammer Ducks For Cover

rabidgremlin writes "The New Zealand Herald has an article about a NZ based spammer who has shut up shop after being at the receiving end of an anti-spam campaign. Good riddance I say, but some of his comments ("never intended to break any regulations" and "I'll just stick to search engines and web sites - that's still plenty of fun and money.") had me wondering if he and other spammers are as really naive as the article makes out."

Comments

Booo-hooo

[The Bungi]

He had received more than 20 phone calls, five of them obscene. [...] he had been subscribed to a gay-dating site and his email address had been added to "tons of email lists". [...] "I have already banned my 5-year-old from answering the phone," he said.

Well, cry me a river. I'm sure that there are 5-year olds out there whose parents were a bit concerned about their kids receiving penis-enlargement emails and links to porn websites. Oh, and "tons of email lists"... I thought everything these fucks did was "opt-in"? Does he mean to insinuate that that's not the case? Bwahaha.

Cry me a river indeed. Maybe this is a good way to kill them off.

so instead of spamming..

[gl4ss]

.. he will devote his time to making linkfarms and other bogus websites with zero content? yeah that sounds like a plan to feed your family.

for the one's that don't know, it involves making sites that attract clicks(by looking like there could be for example emulation roms downloadable, or pron from there) from for example google and link to other sites of the same author to get the authors sites up in the search, thus polluting the search service with meaningless s**t making some fields of 'research' quite impossible to search with google without scripts for filtering that kind of stuff out of the results (doesn't need that much of a work with googleapi, and there's just few of these assholes making these sites and they tend to use the same referral id's on their ads on all of their sites making it a bit easier to filter them this filtering on client side needs a lot of bandwith though,and isn't that fast, obviously).

i'm wondering if somebody has made a decent easy to use program/scripts to use BIG blacklists with google (i hacked something together some time ago but it's not exactly easy to use for everyday stuff)?

spammers do seem to drink their own kool-aid

[bennomatic]

I've had SPAM-vertisers try to sign up the company I work for as a client, and I've had them try to convince me that it's OK to advertise that way. One guy got really aggrivated when I tried to explain that when it takes 20 minutes a day to delete all the viagra ads you get, 20 minutes for the mortgage ads, etc..., that very very very few people actually feel that they have been provided with a service when they receive SPAM e-mail.

I don't think, for the most part, that they are naive in the classical sense of the word; I think that they are closer to delusional. They have been given all the information they need, and they have chosen the interpretation which is going to let them do what they want to do.

However, I have seen a couple of occasions where a SPAM has been followed a couple of days later by an apology, where it truly does appear that someone has had a break-through experience and now understands that SPAM is a bad idea, where they truly did not understand that previously.

One down...

[CoffeeDad]

The problem is that *real* spamlords sell/rent/MLM convenient little subscription kits, services, tools and utilities that enable mindless drooling head-bobbers like this to join the ranks of spammers. No way of telling now, whether it was just another spammerzombie, or one of the real kingpins. Shoot 'em all, I say.

-- Don't just delete spam, delete spammers. join SpammerHunters

Re:20 phone calls?

[GammaTau]

Wow, the guys sends millions of e-mail messages, then he closes up shop after getting 20 unsolicited phone calls.

Actually that sounds like a good strategy. If even a tiny group of all the people who receive spam would give feedback by making a phone call, I think it could make many spammers to reconsider their business. Assuming that you get the right person on the line, it will take them a few seconds or minutes per each caller (as opposed to a mail bounce or a mail reply that won't ever be read by a real person) plus they will get a fair share of verbal abuse they deserve.

Vigilante justice...

[ktakki]

From the article:

New Zealand does not have specific anti-spam laws.

I used to think that comparing the Internet to the Wild West was just as bad as that "superhighway" metaphor, but lately I've come to realize how appropriate it's come to be.

You've got a legal vacuum for the most part, considering that most law enforcement authorities won't take action until a certain monetary dollar amount of damage has been done (with some notable exceptions such as child pornography). Thus, the medium is dominated by penis-enlarging snake oil salesmen, grizzled dataminers trying to pass off fool's gold as the real thing, men in black hats, men in white hats, Indians with H1B visas (yeah, I know...), and e-mail programs infected with smallpox.

I only beat the Net Rush of '94 by a couple of years, but I've heard some of the oldtimers tell tales of yore, when the whole community would get together to raise a barn or wire a school with CAT-5, or how you could always rely on your neighbor to help mend a fence or patch sendmail.

"Round up a posse, boys. We'll head 'em off at the router..."

Yeah, it's a stretch. I know. But everytime I look in that Deadman's Gulch I call my inbox, my trigger finger starts to itch and I yearn for a nice .45-70 Henry rifle.

k.

Smut to children not a crime?

[gbnewby]

This is something I don't understand. I hope someone can explain or point me to an explanation of what I will try to describe. We all know there are very few laws against spam, and jurisdiction problems even if such laws exist.

Explain to me why it's not easy to demonstrate that someone that puts explicit spam in a child's mailbox isn't committing some sort of other crime. I don't mean "get a good mortgage rate," I mean some of the bad porn related stuff we all see, at least periodically.

So, hypothetically, let's say it's against the law in California to send some gang-bang smut ad to young Timmy. What is preventing the district attorneys, Timmy's mom, etc. from getting an injunction against John Doe? From a subpoena being issued?

Forget for now that tracing back the originator is tough. I'm asking, can't they be charged with a crime in, say, California? THEN, if they're discovered, OR if they ever travel to California & get caught (say, for a speeding ticket), they'll be in deep doo-doo.

This costs money, takes time, and doesn't find the spammers, I agree. But it will make a spammer who wants to go to a conference or travel think twice....and maybe open a whole new dot-com business opportunity: bounty hunters for the charged-but-not-yet-caught spammers.

Someone please explain why these people aren't guilty of crimes that are not spam specific, and why they can't be charged in jurisdictions where the spam is received.

He got off lightly

[The Famous Brett Wat]

Only 20 or so angry phone calls? I've had my personal phone numbers included in "Joe Job" spam (where a spammer deliberately impersonates you in order to cause you grief), and my phone rang off the hook all day with irate callers. Bit of an uneven playing field, wouldn't you say? I've never sent any spam at all, and I've had it far worse.

Re:yeah...

[The Wicked Priest]

He was talking about gaming the search engines -- you know, that silly shit where scores of irrelevant words that are likely to show up in someone's search are added to a page in an attempt to get it more views. This is what he aims to fall back on, since spam backfired on him. Honest work is right out.