Dozens Charged in Spam Crackdown

JohnnyGTO writes "Federal and state law enforcement agencies have quietly arrested or charged dozens of people with crimes related to junk e-mail, identity theft and other online scams in recent weeks, according to several people involved in the actions."

Comments

Well

[Billly Gates]

I hope the people for www.freeipods.com get busted too.

I am so sick of them.

Re:Well

[Maestro4k]

• What's the deal with the freeipods thing? I always figured it must be a scam, but never really bothered finding out what it was all about

It's a marketing thing. You have to sign up and complete a sponsered offer, then get 5 friends to sign up under you as referrals. (They neeed to complete an offer as well.) Then after they verify that everything's completed properly you can order a free iPod or iPod mini. They're apparently legit though, the company running it is Gratis Networks who also does a lof of other free sites (freevideogames, etc.). They don't encourage spamming though (although a lot of people think they do). This is posted on their site pages (after you're logged in at least):

• We encourage users to post their referral link online, but will not tolerate users who mass-post on the internet. Report referral abuse here.

Re:Well

[stratjakt]

"Legit" my ass.

It's an pyramid scheme, and I'm surprised they're still running, being as such operations are illegal in the US, and most other first world nations. They must be running offshore somewhere.

Re:Well

[Aliencow]

as I posted before, I registered a special email address on FreeIpod just for fun. Just this morning, I got 3 spams on it. "Advance in Pay; On the way!" "Validation ticket for extra funds attached" "Payday advance pending. Please inquire within"

And in other news...

[gowen]

The US is still the biggest source of spam on the net, pumping out nearly 3 times as much as its closest competitor.

Re:T-Minus Five Minutes & Counting...

[gcaseye6677]

Finding every penny can be difficult when the larger spammers route money overseas into foreign bank accounts. Then there's the Florida bankruptcy laws which make it nearly impossible to take the spammer's multi million dollar mansion (many spammers have one in Florida for this reason). I do agree, however, that more efforts like this will decrease the profitability of spamming and cause more people to come to the conclusion that spamming is not worth it. Then of course they'll go back to selling used cars, bouncing checks, or whatever they did before the internet became popular.

Spam consequences

[Joe 'Nova']

I know it clogs servers, but PHBs are still fear mongering to charge $.01 for each sent email, idea being spammers will have to pay for the right(?) to abuse. I see it as punish the rest for a few, the few who will never care what happens to the innocent, they still make money.
As a public service, the following domains have been banished, as well as 95% of Megs of spam a week:
@2243.ewsifh398.com
@mx31.blindu89.biz
@o ptin1.clickformail.com

Before I banned them, I got at least 1 meg spam/3 days. That'll kill my inbox, and my provider was kind enough to remove all my old, dust covered emails I was saving so they could provide me this bright, shiny new spam! AGH! Wanted to KILL!

If servers would route this junk to an universal delete before it got to destination, the spammers would be out of business. There would have to be a distributed system for qualifying what was spam, and just not allowing the system to send it. Attatchments are another peeve of mine, with 30k virus attatched(Would you like to open this?). If I have never sent to the email in question, then I sould never see a Re: coming from them, filter! It would save gigs for provider alone!
Just my thoughts, and you are entitled to them >:{

Re:Ashcroft is now good?

[Dr. Manhattan]

Whoever Mr. Ashcroft is in private life... he has a job to do... You may agree or disagree with the way that he does it, but it shouldn't be anything personal, on his part or yours.

Well, what I know about him personally isn't much, but what there is of it I don't like (e.g. the 'covering up' of the justice statue because of (heaven forfend) a breast).

The way he has carried out his job, however, I find abhorrent. Pushing the "PATRIOT Act", all by itself, would warrant my condemnation. But looking into how much torture U.S. interrogators could get away with, and refusing to own up to it, is beneath contempt.