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Can A Bounty System Cure Spam?
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.'"
Can A Bounty System Cure Spam?
Unlikely. But, if the law actually get's off it's ass and actually hands out fines, spammers might be more inclined to stick the equivalent of "this is spam" (the opt-out message, etc.), which could make filtering more effective.
Perhaps we should be fining the ISPs who happily let spam-servers loose on their network?
"It would promote vigilantism on the Net and it probably would not catch any bad guys," said Louis Mastria, spokesman for the Direct Mail Association
There are plenty of technically-skilled knowledgable people out there who might otherwise not have bothered, but who could probably track a few people down.
'the FCC has so much information on their identities that to get anymore would be useless.'
We don't care whether they're known or not. We just want to bankrupt them and get the money we have lost* due to spam.
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* Most end-users don't lose money, but the amount of stress and anger caused to me by spam has probably shortened my lifespan, and can you put a price on that?
We would need an organized way of combining suits against spammers. Otherwise, those millions of individual suits would clog the courts. A bounty system is the perfect solution. People who collect information on their spammers would organize and report that information to a centralized organization which would handle the actual law suits. Then this organization could pick its targets by employing a pseudo-random, RIAA-style method of picking out random spammers with a boatload of complaints. Any money won would be distributed evenly to those who provided reports on the spammer.
...it worked like current bounty systems.
The police issue warrants for bail jumpers.
Bounty hunters get $$$ for bringing them in.
With a spam bounty system, it could work like this:
The feds put up 'info wanted' notices for specific spammers. It would eliminate the objections people have of vigilantes going after innocent legitimate marketers. The feds would be asking for information about specific spammers, much like the FBI's most wanted list.
You call in leads, the feds prosecute, you get $$$.
The idea here being that there are often people out on the internet who are far more skilled or have far better connections than law enforcement, in tracking down miscreants.
There are likely a lot more net-skilled individuals out there than there are law enforcement officials with good net skills.
Why not put that talent to use, a bounty is great incentive (besides the satisfaction of putting spammers out of business).
Pretty simple.
They live in the USA, they are american citizens. They just spam using servers in china to try to hide the true origin.
Very few spammers actually bother to move outside US borders. And even then, unless they officially renounce their citizenship, they are still US citizens and can still be deported + prosecuted -- no matter where in the world they may be.
The US courts can sieze their assets. Their house, their cars, their computers, etc. Ever wonder what all those government auctions are? Most of them are auctioning off siezed property from criminals. There is serious $$ there.
So yes, there's plenty the US courts can take from them, unless they're living underneath a bridge in a cardboard box.
Finally, a poster that sees it right (or at least my way...:).
Spamming and spamvertised business have become enmeshed in the otherwise legitmate economy (either through banking, ISPs, list brokering or trickle-down to middlemen like mortgage intermediaries).
Why isn't the FTC leaning on those people? Or at least publicizing their involvement in spam, even if it is indirect?
Furthermore, given the prima faciae fraudulent and/or illegal nature of spamvertised businesses and products, why isn't the FBI starting RICO investigations against these third parties whose implicit cooperation is necessary for spammers to do business at all? RICO has serious penalties and can be used to "bundle" miscellaneous state and federal law violations that would otherwise be unprosecutable or not worth prosecuting individually.
There's too much of this "it's all overseas" mantra and "we can't do anything about it." I say bullshit -- there's a money trail to follow and a bunch of people who would rather not be the target of a Federal racketeering indictment who live right here in the USA.
What I've noticed is that a fair amount of spam mails still feature .com addresses, and to an increasing amount .biz and .info (I'm already thinking of banning all incoming email which contains a link of any sort to .biz and .info sites...)
What I also noticed is, that the domain names get weirder and weirder. So after all, I also see a responsibility on the domain registrar's site. If someone is registering domains like amsnbxtr.com, amsnbzxw.com, mnevbdsx.com, msnbsczx.com, wiggle6767tabs.us, or coolness6579meds.us it doesn't take much brains to guess the future use and sane registrars would probably deny requests if a bunch of nonsensical domain registrations comes in -- especially after they found spam pointing to the last batch of domain registrations.
So the registration comes from fishy registrars, fine. Then just block all addresses which are registered through one of these registrars... The above examples, for instance, point to just two distinct registrars.
Next generation spam filtering might just mean parsing the incoming mail for the occurrence of links, checking those domains against whois and the whois result against a badlist of known fishy registrars.
It's crude. It's unelegant. But it surely ruins the business of both, the spammer and the greedy registrars who just care for registration fees.
I agree. There is a money trail, and that is the problem. Somewhere in back someone has to be spending some of those profits in kickbacks for protection.
The spam is illegal. The products are fraudulent. The trail exists. Nothing is done.
Why?
Because your politicians never actually read their own email, so they don't have to deal with it.
Start printing the spam and sending it in to Congress, making use of the free postage when contacting your representative, and keep doing that for a few months.
Flood them with paper as you are flooded with spam, and I guarantee they'll finally get off their asses and do something about the problem instead of just lip-service laws with no enforcement.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I replied to one of the mortgage spams just to see who would call. Intuit called. Maybe I should stop using Quickbooks and TurboTax.
A couple years ago someone hijacked my mail server. I kept some of the spams and called the company, a real brick and mortar business, and asked them why they had illegally hijacked my server. They put me in touch with the company they had hired to do the emailing. That company had subcontacted it out and gave me the phone number of the subcontractor who turned out to be a couple with a cable modem working from their home. They had bought some spam blaster program (from a spam) and had gone into business. After talking to them, I really don't think they knew how the program worked. They had just received a package telling them how to use the program and a list of email marketting companies that hired subcontractors.
So, should the dumb couple be sued for everything they own? Should I turn them over to the FTC? How do you separate the willful from the dumb?