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Can A Bounty System Cure Spam?

Posted by timothy on from the cure-is-a-strong-word dept.

dankinit writes "The FTC is considering a proposal made popular by Lawrence Lessig which would offer a bounty to people who help catch spammers. The proposal looks to harness the power of volunteers online who might want a piece of the multimillion dollar fines spammers could incur. Spamhaus founder Steve Linford doesn't like the idea though, explaining '...the FTC already has so much information on their identities that to get anymore would be useless.'"

1 of 281 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Cure 81 doesn't work, try #82.... by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually, far more than 50% of the spammers are in the US. The Spam Conference at MIT went into this in some depth. The US is where the bandwidth and the money are, it's where connectivity is plentiful and easy to get without showing legitimate ID, etc. So most of the spammers are there.

    But you're quite right that almost all spam is trivially trackable to where the spammer wants the money to go. Unfortunately, the CANSPAM act just made it nearly impossible to go after spammers in court, reserving that ability to federal authorities who couldn't find their own IP address if you burned it on their asses with a branding iron.