FTC Recommends Bounty on Spammers

joke-boy writes "AP reports that as part of the CANSPAM legislation, the FTC has issued a report recommending placing taxpayer-funded 6-figure bounties on spammers, much like the bounties placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted."

Comments

Innocent Spammers

[Cat9117600]

What about the people who are unknowingly sending spam from their cracked computers? Is this basically saying that there is a 6-digit bounty for the grandmother who doesn't know enough to keep her computer secure?

Re:Innocent Spammers

[dasunt]

What a great idea! How wonderful! How utterly sensible! We all know nobody has a right to operate a computer unless they first verify all code running on it to be secure. It's not the vendor's fault. Just like people who die in airline crashes deserve it because they did not verify the plane would land safely.

I'm not expected to know 100% about my car. But if I avoid doing safety basic precautions (replacing tires when they are bald) and get into trouble (sliding into another car on a rainy night) then a good lawyer is going to rightfully pin part of the blame on me.

Legal precedents could apply in other ways, such as creating an attractive nuisence.

that's hardly fair to the taxpayers

[CAIMLAS]

Why make the taxpayers pay for cleaning up the internet of spam?

Make the spammers pay out the bounty. There's absolutely no reason to make taxpayers (you know, citizens) suffer and go further in debt (via the nation) for the crimes to humanity that spammers have perpetrated.

Re:that's hardly fair to the taxpayers

[drinkypoo]

Presumably the spammers' assets will be seized. Maybe some of that money can go back into the system to pay the bounties, et cetera.

After thinking about it...

[The Master Control P]

I have, in the past, made a handful of comments w.r.t. the spam problem. After thinking about it for a bit, I've come to realize that the solution is not so much in applying new technology but applying new people.

Think about it: Right now, almost everything that lands in the spammer's inbox is signal because right now, no one in their right mind responds to offers for the hottest young teens on the net and herbal viagra. Thus, it's trivial for them to send out a hundred million e-mails and it's also easy to sort through the maybe one thousand people dumb enough to respond: It's almost ALL signal.

But, suppose that of those hundred million people, ten million clicked the link and a million responded. The S/N ratio goes from 10:1 to 1:1000 or 1:10000. It's no longer going to be economical for the spammer to sort through so much static. It should be possible to respond to, perhaps, 1/10 or 1/20 of the spam you get. It won't take much... Just something like "I'm very intrigued by your offer. Please tell me more." You can't use a computer script to generate responses, because they can easily be filtered out just like you filter 99% of spam. You'll maybe spend 30 minutes a day to respond to 60 spams.

Before long, the bastards will spend so goddamn much time sorting through the static that they won't be able to send more! The only problem is, what do we do to reedcuate the millions of idiots (ie the ones who create the problem in the FIRST PLACE!!!) who are (mostly) trained to pound the delete key?

When law enforcement does nothing, why bother?

[Animats]

It's not that hard to find spammers. Except for the clueless guy the FTC had in charge of the project. The one who, after a year, realized they should try to follow the money. Isn't that covered in Introduction to Law Enforcement 101?

There's a whole spammer infrastructure, a constellation of crooked companies that make profitable spamming possible. They're not hard to find. Most of them are committing felonies. So why aren't we hearing about arrests once a week or so, instead of once a year? Most of the players are actually in the US or Canada, even though they may seem to be offshore.

Just as an exercise, I looked at the last spam I received. It was a porno spam, linking to a web site in China. But on the payment page, the form submission was to a server in Canada, connected to Bellnexxia. That's fairly common. Often, spammers don't want to process the payments through the anonymous crooked ISP that serves the data.

What's really needed is to apply pressure to the banking system to shut down the "high risk third party billing" operations upon which spammers rely for credit card processing. A few money laundering cases would clear up that issue.

California spammer running for Senate

[dananderson]

It's interesting the report was requested by Congress. California has a spammer, Bill Jones, running for Senate (Republican, BTW). So we can have a spammer deciding the laws for spammers. Sort of like the fox guarding the chicken house.

California had a state law that was to go into effect where citizens can collect fines from spammers (at least in state). Unfortunately the so-called "CAN Spam Act," nullified the state law. So the CAN Spam Act actually encouraged, not discouraged SPAM. The members of Congress are no doubt technically ignorant and easily presuaded by lobbyists (especially the Direct Marketing Association) that I don't see much hope from the old geezers (no disrespect :-).

Definition of Irony

[nwbvt]

Should such legislation be enacted, the FTC (or whoever collects such tips) will have their inboxes flooded with bogus reports of spammers from people just wanting to make a few easy bucks.

BTW, editors, why don't you guys RTFA once in a while. The FTC is not recommending anything. All they did was figure out what type of reward would be needed should such a system be implemented. From the article itself:

The FTC, in a report requested by Congress, did not take a position on whether such a system was a good idea.

Way to completely miss the point of the article.