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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.'"
"I want them alive... no disintegration." Oh to be a bounty hunter...
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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.
The problem is that the worst these people are setting themselves up outside of US jurisdiction, so that FTC and company just can't get to them. Any spammer who doesn't is excessively stupid. There's nothing that the US courts can take from them... and I just don't think offering 20% of $0 is going to do much anyway.
Yet they can freeze assets of suspected terrorists? Not to mention small time dope dealers.
Spammers need to get paid in some way, too. That means that they will have US bank/merchant accounts. Those can be frozen, assets can be seized.
Seizing assets happens in the war on drugs, but not when it comes to a white collar crime like spamming; by far a less "victim-less" crime.
Credit card charges can be charged back to the acquirer (even if the dumb customer is satisfied). Acquirers can change their merchant contracts to prohibit spamming today.
Profits made by mortgage intermediaries that don't care that their leads are spam-generated can be garnered (the leading mortgage banks could decide to include an anti-spamming clause in the contracts they offer intermediaries today).
Meanwhile, mortgage lenders and credit card acquirers remain complicit, even though they do crack down on other types of crime - namely fraud, which would cost them the most money, as opposed to the crime of spamming where the costs is borne by society at large.
They're just out to make a quick buck, bless 'em..
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
But we could go a long way towards eliminating Spam if the right people would grow some backbone and do the right thing.
1. Cut off Spam from the Zombies.
Cable and DSL companies should block all port 25 traffic coming from their customers. If you want to send e-mail, you should have to use use their SMTP servers. Running your own mail-server is against their TOS in many cases, anyway.
In all fairness, however, this could be handled on a case by case basis. If you are such a macho techno-geek that you really really really really just absolutely HAVE TO run your own mail server, you should have to ask them for persmission first and enter into some sort of agreement that you will not be part of the Spam problem.
2. Cut off the Zombies.
Any cable/DSL customers spewing out large volumes of e-mail (without permission to run a mail server) get a nasty letter, telling them that their service has been terminated until they secure their computer.
3. Follow the money. Follow the money.
Spammers have to make money, somebody has to get paid. They aren't doing this for the fun of it. Trace the money trail back to the people who get paid for the herbal viagra and penis enlargement pills. It isn't easy, but it can be done. If you follow the money, and apply EXISTING laws, such as:
* Child Pornography Statute 18 U.S.C. 2252
* Electronic Communications Privacy Act 18 U.S.C. 2701-2711
* Economic Espionage and Protection of Trade Secrets Law Pub. L. No. 104-294
* Computer Fraud and Abuse Act 18 U.S.C. 1030
* Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act 50 U.S.C. 1801-1811
* Transportation of Obscene Matter for Sale or Distribution 18 U.S.C. 1465
* Federal Wire Fraud Act 18 U.S.C. 1343
you can shut down the Spammers.
Unfortunately, that's closing the barn door after the horse has already gotten out. Nearly all web server operators pull spammer sites offline as soon as they realize what has hit them to cut off the money chain before the transaction even happens. However, that's too late, the e-mail has already been sent.
Spamming's so profitable when it works that they can put up with an insanely low response rate... unless you can put up a perfect blockade to catch all money headed their way, you're never gonna get it all.
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.