Slashdot Mirror
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."
It's about time that law enforcement began to see spam for what it is -- not just an annoying bulk mailing operation, but part of a larger racketeering operation that's primarily focused on defrauding people.
I've long advocated RICO-style investigations (if not actual RICO prosecutions) of the entire world of spam. This doesn't just mean the bulk mailing operations, but the people behind the actual spamvertised businesses and their legitimate-world suppliers.
Broad-based prosecutions promising long prison time not only for spammers, and spam businesses but for people who knowingly make money off of spammers (banks, ISPs, list vendors, etc) will go a long way towards demotivating people in the legitimate business world from working with spammers/spam businesses.
Spammers and spam businesses need a certain cooperation and acceptance in the legitimate business world to make money. Without that, they'll be far less effective.
The submitter missed the most interesting part of the entire article: the fact that this crackdown is financed mainly by spammers (the direct marketing assoc)! They probably are just trying to get rid of the most blatant illegal stuff so they can further their goal of legitamizing spam. Or they could just be cracking down on competitors with the Fed's help.
Much of the financing for the efforts, known as Operation Slam Spam, comes from the Direct Marketing Association, a trade group that wants to promote what it sees as the legitimate use of e-mail marketing.
I totally agree with you. I don't see why these people are getting "quietly arrested". The number of actual scam mail (which is clearly illegal, as opposed to spam mail, which is just annoying) I've been getting recently is alarming. I'm up to getting 1 to 2 a day of the various Citibank/PayPal/eBay scam phishing mail. I don't get caught with them because I very carefully check URLs (and I use Thunderbird and Firefox so I'm not vulnerable to URL masking attacks). But I can imagine the average Joe Schmoe very easily getting taken with these scams. Law enforcement needs to track down these criminals and give them hard time. Heck, it's not even that hard ... all of the phishing scams have to rely on a faked site that is hosted somewhere on the net. Whenever I come across one of these, I check its whois data, and if it's located in the U.S., I send something off to the registrar telling them the domain is being used for something clearly illegal. Usually, within a day, the domain no longer works. Heck, about half of the phishing mail I get these days points to links that are already taken down!
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