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."
Shouldn't it be a lot larger number? I mean, I'm glad that they are trying to stop this stuff, but please. Make a big impact showing how much we hate spammers, and maybe, just maybe, it will scare a bunch and lower our spam in our inboxes.
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But Mr. Linford of Spamhaus said he thought that the current wave of prosecutions had the potential to at least temporarily diminish the flood of spam.
Does ANYONE think that this will reduce spam in the near future? I'm still getting flooded, and I'll bet anything that my spam filters won't get any kind of a breather just because of a few arrests.
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
They may have to keep all the money from the prince of Nigeria, who died 10 years ago in a terrible plane crash, to pay attorney fees. At least they have that.
Isn't part of the punishment for the crime supposed to be that it serves as a deterrent for other's who'd do the same thing?
... is lost, if you keep it a *secret*! Why didn't you tell the world, eh?"
To quote Dr. Strangelove:
"Of course, the whole point
Specialization is for insects. - R.A.H.
How many of them had the FBI break down their doors and seize their computers? Or was it more like "Mr Spammer, after you've called your attorney, we'd like you to come down to the station for a few hours..."
I mean, it's not like they're hackers....
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Does this mean that Ashcroft is now our friend or is this the wrong week?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I'd pay for a ticket - or at least a web cast.
Sell "execution privs" on a ebay to the highest bidder.
Use licensed Marshals and bounty hunters to capture them.
Put a bounty on their heads.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
The US is still the biggest source of spam on the net, pumping out nearly 3 times as much as its closest competitor.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Patience! We have to convict them first. Arrested != proven guilty.
:-}
After the proof, go for it. Don't bother with helmets when you drag them to the moon; the enclosure would restrict their freedom of speech.
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.
According to the article, the DMA is funding this "crackdown". They are trying to make it easier for DMA members to get their spam noticed. The DMA got the you CAN Spam law written they way that they wanted it written, now they are using it to kill the competition. This is just one more example of an industry cartel using laws that they bought and paid for to kill anybody who is not a member of the cartel.
Spammers get a lot of blame for all this, and they should - they're evil. But don't forget two important parties in all of this - the advertisers and the fools that actually READ their spam.
Any company willing to spam others needs to have its practices reexamined. How can the justice department go after spammers and not even blink at the advertising firms that PAY to have it all done? It's like putting the hitman in jail and ignoring the mobster that hired him.
And let's not forget that sending out mass emails has to be worth it to companies, otherwise one would think they wouldn't do it. There's a reason that you keep getting reminders to have your penis enlarged, and it's not because they found your email address on slashdot. People are buying this crap, and these morons need to be stopped now.
I'd call for more education on the subject ("How not to click on that popup" or "How to ignore or filter your spam email"), but due to the fact that it is much more gratifying and probably cheaper overall to just throw the emailers into jail, as well as the fact that I'm a nobody, my calls would proabably go unheeded.
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.
"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.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.o ptin1.clickformail.com
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
@
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 >:{
This mind intentionally left blank.
The KKK a bunch of sheetheads? You decide!
Whew... thank God. My penis was getting so long I was starting to trip over it.
I always save my last mod point to mod up a good troll. You people are too serious.
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"
they don't encourage spamming but their (semi scam) business model causes normal people to spam, and then invent all kinds of crazy reasoning how their spam isn't spam. that line of theirs encourages things like comment spamming on blogs and so on.
i don't mind if someone wants to advertise that they're gullible in their sig tho... the whole point is that they want you to get your friends to buy expensive services or products, and actually they want you to fail after you've gained 2-3 friends who've done it. the point is that you could just ask each of your friends for 40-50$ or screw 'em over in arranged poker game(but nobody really gets 5 of his friends to do the stuff so you need to find willing people online).
funny how people defend the program how it works _BEFORE_ they get their ipods too.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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!
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
> I don't see why these people are getting "quietly arrested".
Is it not obvious? Spammers are all being shipped to a secret government location.
At these secure sites, Chairs, tables, projectors, and Powerpoint presentations are being prepared even as we speak.
Clueless bureaucrats are covertly stepping out of their dreary cubicles to attend these highly classified seminars
Within a year, "W3 R the G0vernment and R H3re 2 hep U" will be flooding the inboxes of the land.
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.