Slashdot Mirror
Spam from Taiwan
TristanGrimaux writes "According to a recent study done by CipherTrust, two thirds of the world's spam is sent by Taiwan servers. The US follows with 24% and in a distant third is China with only 3% of the servers who actually sends the spam." The article cites easy access to broadband and lack of crackdown on offenders as the main contributing factors.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Availability of relatively cheaper computing power with good bandwidth?
Some legal stuff?
Availability of some skill set?
So Taiwan isn't part of China now? OK, I'm confused.
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
One thing that surprised me in TFA was the claim that China has cheap broadband access. Perhaps I suffer from some cliched view of China, but it surprises me to hear that China has cheap broadband. Any knowledgeable person like to fill in the details? Here in France we have very cheap broadband, but doesn't seem like France is producing much zombie spam.
John.
Visit SpamOrHam and help in the fight
http://www.atomicsoftwaresolutions.com/honeybot.ph p
With this software emulating an open SOCKS proxy, I've been able to detect several scans of port 1080, and then attempts to send e-mail to different servers around the world (i.e. Israel).
I don't remember if I got requests from Taiwan, but I did get them from South Korean IPs.
More like follow the offshore bank accounts, Grand Cayman Islands, etc.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Instead of figuring out where most of the spam comes from, they should figure out which geographic location churns out the most humorous spam. It could be a world wide competition.
As for following the money...I let the SEC do that. About once a week, I get a spam message pushing one stock or another. I forward them to enforcement (at) sec.gov. The message gets looked over by a lawyer.
I don't know that it does anything about the spam, but hopefully whoever paid for the message gets paid back.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
And they don't need to. With their billion+ population, one fifth of the world can be reached without passing the invisible borders!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Taiwan makes more than 66% of the notebooks on which we read that spam, so they're actually overperforming on the content:reader ratio. I wish they'd get more into eBooks.
--
make install -not war
Impossible! Go USA! Go USA! We can win the spam race!
Philosophy.
"Shoes for industry! Shoes for the dead!"
"Hi. I'm Joe Beets. Say, what chance does a returning deceased war veteran have for good paying job, more sugar, and that free mule you always dreamed of? Well, think it over. Then take off your shoes. Now you can see how increased spending opportunities mean harder work for everyone, and more of it, too! So do your part today, Joe. Join with millions of your neighbors and turn in your shoes!"
"For INDUSTRY!"
(Happy motoring on the freeway which is all ready in progress.)
More like follow the offshore bank accounts, Grand Cayman Islands, etc.
I lived there. Internet access is expensive as it was a government protected monopoly. Check the rates. Cable and Wireless is the company. To visit, see www.candw.ky.
When they first put in internet, they got 2 satelite T1 links for the whole island. Little Cayman and Cayman Brac still did not have internet. They charged $0.25/minute for access on dial up.
Needless to say I didn't get internet until I returned to the states.
They have since gotten a Fiber Optic cable to Jamaca and they now offer DSL. They are running a promotion for $25/month for the first year. That is CI $ not USD. The price is close to US $30/month. Restrictions such as can't compete with the phone company by using VOIP is the norm.
The plan appears to be capped at 256K unless you upgrade to a faster plan. For example the 1024 plan is CI $74. The 512 plan is $59.
Cayman Islands is a nice place to go for diving and sun, but not for internet based business.
The truth shall set you free!
Availability of relatively cheaper computing power with good bandwidth?
Some legal stuff?
Availability of some skill set?
All of the above, and more. Taiwan is a great place to outsource technology intensive operations. Perhaps spammers have discovered this. In a nutshell, spamming is just another technology driven business.
Maybe it's so great that even China outsources their spam generation there too. Hence their low spam generation figures.
---- It won't be as bad as you fear or as good as you hope, but it will take twice as long as you plan.
You don't do the business itself from the Caymans, just your under-the-radar finances.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
I believe the main issue is that broadband here is pretty much monopolized by Hinet. If you have a phone (landline), chances are you have a Hinet e-mail address. For some reason Hinet never, ever, authenticates their e-mail servers allowing them to be used from anywhere for any purpose. As a result a lot of companies (like AOL possibly) have just banned the whole entire Hinet domain, which often results in e-mails going outside of Taiwan never getting to their intended recipient. Hinet is a mess, I don't why they're so bloody awful at maintaining their servers responsibly, but its providing to be a huge problem both worldwide and for Taiwanese people themselves.
So, what about Russian, Ukranian, India spammers. I bet that each county sent at least 10% of spam letters.
CipherTrust operates a service called "Trusted Source" - it allows anybody to input an IP address, searching CipherTrust's DB to see if any spam has come from that IP recently. Aside from being generally useless, here are some of the funnier results:
0 255.0.0.0 - "Spam"1 224.0.0.1 - "Unverified"
http://www.trustedsource.org/query.php?q=255.0.0.
http://www.trustedsource.org/query.php?q=0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 - "Spam"
http://www.trustedsource.org/query.php?q=224.0.0.
Since they have most of my favorite subnet masks listed as a "Spam" source, I'm not sure that I trust any "research" that comes from these guys.. YMMV.
Ok, I know you're trying to be clever with your "Content Restriction, Annulment and Protection" acronym, but it doesn't make any sense. Why not just "Consumer Rights Annulment Provision"? Much less ambiguous, and much more direct.
That said... Yes. The Cayman Islands and a couple other small nations serve as fiduciary havens, not infrastructure.
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
By the way... Most spammers who sent you letters to visit their web pages want's you to click their Google adSense ads. So, help them! Keep clicking Google banner untill your arm get tired and guess what happened. Google will close their account in one second because Google systems will decide that advertiser trying to cheat. It is impossible to open account again! SPAMMER DEAD!
that china will try to take taiwan and that all the spam servers will be destroyed in the war that follows. //is it a bad sign that the confirmation image says battler?
If a mailer manages to supply those crippled IP's then the mail is definitely fake, and most likely spam (or virus). Don't confuse a legitimate subnet mask with a fake IP.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Let the SEC do it.
The SEC. Ha. A worthless three letter agency, if you ask me.
The SEC's lawyers wanted my help on stock tout junk faxes. I told them I had the information they wanted and I could get the rest and testify- but only if they were going to put the junk faxers out of business. They had no intention of doing anything. They are just going through the motions, drawing government salaries. I declined to help them.
Like the FCC, another worthless three letter agency.
They fined Fax.com $5.4 million for sending out junk faxes. The FCC's lawyers wanted my help too, if I had bothered with them the fine would have been $240 million. I have files full of those junk faxes.
The FCC did nothing whatsoever to collect. NOTHING
If you or I owed the government money I can assure you they would be collecting from us.
.
Prince Desmond Okotiebor Etete himself MUST account for at least 10% of all spam...
But if there was less spam, there wouldn't be anything for them to do!
Somedays I almost wish that some of this Taiwanese spam showed up in a character set I could read so at least I could have a good laugh at it, or at least learn how they are trying to extract money from illicit private bank accounts!
"Dear Sir or Madam,
This email may to you as a surprise, but I am Mr. Chen Liao, son of former Taiwanese president Lin Liao, who was murdered by ninjas, and I need your help recovering $25 million Taiwanese Dollars..."
That is why my spam has typos and leet speak in the subjects and email message, for example: buy cheap c1alis, /i@gra and other best pharmaceuticals =-= gghgtmn
I run my own mail server for my private email that I only use with friends.
Lately, I have been getting spam about stock investments, and I notice that
it was pretty consistent so I started investigating what was going on with
my server. I started marking down ip addresses of the offending servers
and blocking them if I felt they were not legitimate mail servers or if it
was from a country that I know I will not get email from on my personal email
account.
I have been blocking a new server every day for 2 months.
Here is the scarey part. I still get the same email spam every day, but
only once.
My hunch is telling me that the purveyor of this message is using some
sophisticated means of harnassing zombie machines to send messages, and is
only sending a few messages at a time so that automated blackhole lists
never catch on fast enough. (such as spamhaus)
I have noticed that these machines are almost always located in Asia,
Latin America, or Eastern Europe...
It got so bad, I just started block entire class A's from countries I know
I am not going to email to or from.
59
61
80
81
83
84
85
87
88
201
211
218
221
222
Cayman Islands is a nice place to go for diving and sun, but not for internet based business.
Surely it depends rather a lot on what sort of Internet-based business we are talking about. Running a spam empire only means sending one relatively short bit of text once - the machines doing the spamming could be anywhere in the world, and, indeed, if I was planning a semi-legal or illegal business, I'd be keen to keep the servers as far away from me (both physically and in terms of hops and audit trails) as possible.
Virtually serving coffee
After WW2 and the end of the Japanese occupation, a civil war was fought between the Communists under Mao and the KMT under Chiang Kai-shek. The KMT were effectively defeated by 1949, and Chiang evacuated to Taiwan. For much of the Cold War, "Free China" (ROC) was the only government of China recognised by most states and international organisations. However, as part of the 'detente' in the 1970s, most countries switched their recognition to Communist China (PRC). The ROC is obviously a state in all but name, but the situation is maintained to avoid nuclear war. The PRC has said that if the ROC declares independence then they will invade, while the US has stated that it will defend Taiwan, and has meanwhile provided large amounts of military aid. So, basically, it's a mess.
I would have expected the spam numbers from China to be larger, but then I remembered; the Chi-Com's are spending all their time trying to hack my server, not send Spam to it.
I'm not really sure how to deal with that, but let us focus as one method of spam. The method would be sending to a variety of e-mail addresses. Those kind of dictionary attacks or whatever they are killed. If e-mail providers were to make some dummy addresses which if hit, could block the e-mail server and/or IP address(es) for a given period of time, wouldn't that work?
(Fine, mod me down if you think this is off topic.)
Almost all the spam comes back to good old USA in one way or another.
Thats alway why I have South America, Africa and all of Asia, all blocks with iptables.
Oh, crap.
ROC used to rule the whole China, mainland and Taiwan combined. They lost the civil war in 1949 and retreated to Taiwan. Neither PRC nor ROC see each other as a ligitimate government of China. At least both constitutions claim largely overlapping territories. It's a stalemale over half a century.
How people are so casual about the facts is beyond me.
People who dislike China tend to mention Tiananmen Square a lot, but they always forget the Tank Man is also a Chinese.
They have taken to serving spam alongside the scorpions, rats and cats.
"If a mailer manages to supply those crippled IPs" ... well that's the trick - a mailer can't supply those IPs because they're simply not valid public IPs. If one of CipherTrust's collection points is reporting traffic from any of those IPs I listed, they have a very obvious network configuration problem (or they're getting spoofed, which is 100% avoidable).
Regardless of what the actual cause is, this is the reason why I don't trust any network-realated research they publish.
Spam, Made In Taiwan ?
Why doesn't that supprise me ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
"Any wagers on USA being said location?"
From the article...
"Spammers themselves, of course, may be located somewhere completely different, such as Boca Raton, USA (for example)."
Any wagers on not RTFA as the cause of this comment??
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. - Douglas Adams
According to the Chinese gov, the correct news would state that they make 69% of the world's spam, USA 24%, and less than 7%, the other 200+ countries that import from them.
Well, even is one country is at 0.001%, I'd still bet they deliver billions of emails a day.
Except it's hardly ever the company itself that is doing the promotions... it's third-party people that target them and convince others, via spam, to invest in the company, which drives the prices up, which allows them to unload their own stock at a profit.
All while being 100% unrelated to the company.
$0.02 (CDN)
Welcome to 1999 !! Taiwan is SPECIAL, but it's still CHINA !!
Any wagers on USA being said location? Russia? Africa? Are there any statistics on where this crap is actually sent from? Follow the money instead of the mail headers? Question marks?
.org is a contributing factor though.
ALL of the spam I get is obviously aimed for american audiences and I live in europe. Wonder if having my email address end with
Is there a quick and easy way to block all e-mail transiting via a Taiwan server?
It's not as though I know (or envisage knowing) anybody in Taiwan.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
Send spam to Chinese people. These people should not be deprived of any knowledge about their government. For the first time spam could be used for good purpose.
Spam: Any activity on internet to gain popularity without paying to advertising companies like Google.
Ok, so how come all the spam blockers don't just block the entire Taiwanese IP range?
:)
Anyone care to disclose the ranges?
Now our ISPs can block everything from said countries to eliminate spam once and for all...
Legally, the civil war in the 40s has not finished yet. Neither side of the war has been eliminated. No treaty or cease-fire agreement was signed. Both sides just prefer not to fight for now.
This situation is very complicated. Indeed, it's getting more complicated as more political powers want to get involved in it. I think the best way to resolve it is to leave it to the Chinese people of both sides to sit down and talk. Any open foreign involvement and provocation from the Taiwan Independence side will risk a full-blown war in the region.
People who dislike China tend to mention Tiananmen Square a lot, but they always forget the Tank Man is also a Chinese.
Were I you, I would simply unblock those addresses and let it all in. Use a bayesian spam filter, such as the one found in Thunderbird. I'm achieving enormous success rates with it and I'll be recommending it to all the lusers in my fold when the next upgrade cycle comes around.
May the Maths Be with you!
They must be good at identifying USA email addresses then. The vast majority of spam I get is from the USA. But then I'm in the UK, so perhaps Taiwan doesn't spam me as much as they spam Americans. Hey, perhaps this is another form of terrorism, is Taiwan on the Axis Of Evil?
Everything else is made in either Taiwan or China, why not SPAM. All the US spammers probably outsource their spam to these countries to get their costs low enough Walmartize the product :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I don't think the article writer was insinuiting that all spammers are located in Boca Raton, USA.
I think in the early days of Spam, most spammers were from the USA, but I think that it is spread globally now.
On another note, what is the deal with so many internet scammers being located in Nigeria, or of Nigerian decent??
It's some strange Chinese letters that should actually give you good fortune and a cookie and whatnot. It just so happens to display that crap in our alphabet.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If most of the spam is coming from this Taiwan then why not add the whole block to a spam black list? I for one never go to any sites that are being served from Taiwan and I don't have any friends their either so if one could OPT-In for country sized spam filtration I am one for the idea. Maybe a combonation of keywords and Geo2IP or something. At least we now know where all the junk is coming from!
Uncle Mantis
Gee, you're smart.
I'm going to photocopy your tip and mail it anonymously to my business competitors, so when they try it, not only will google blacklist the ad account of the website, but they'll also permanently blacklist the subnet of the offending clicker, and any related ad accounts related to the ip of where the offending clicker logs in from. What an idea!
Also, after more than a half dozen years of my filtering spam and never having followed a spam link to a website, it appears you have the higher mental skill set to actually follow the spam links, letting the spammer know your email account is functional and worth spamming. Thanks for taking the flack for the rest of us.
One thing I've noticed is that the spammers themselves must be incredibly afraid of the power the SEC has to put them out of business. If the SEC puts the power they have to go after insider trader violators (and believe me, the laws they have to prosecute them are incredibly effective at "turning" violators and getting them to implicate others), and put that power to work going after spammers, they could lock them up for tens of years each and very quickly. Take a look at every OTC and pink sheet stock scam spam you get. At the bottom, they include the SEC safe harbor language that exempts them from prosecution for promoting stocks without a broker license, among other safe harbor exemption language. So to understand this, you realize that the spammers have no fear of getting caught sending porn spam without the "SEXUALLY EXPLICIT" notice in the subject line of the spam, they have no fear of going to jail for pushing fake or real Viagra or international internet narcotics sales (not legal in any way shape or form in the US no matter what, not even intra-pharmacy), they have no fear of the departments of state or state attorneys general for selling fake diplomas, they have no fear of state banking departments, departments of state, or state attorneys general for soliciting for mortgages without being licensed mortgage brokers in every state they advertise in, they have no fear of local, state, or federal prosecution for fraud for deceptively low interest rates quoted in their spam, fear of other fraud prosecution for their other fraud scams, yet they are so afraid of the SEC laws that they are sure to include safe harbor language in every spam they send.
I think the easiest thing the feds can do to prosecute the spammers is to remove the safe harbor shield for spam promoting public traded companies if the spam hides the originating server, hides the return email address, forges headers, doesn't provide a street address, full legal name, full phone number and any related license number in every spam body, or if they misspell any part of the safe harbor language, or improperly use caps. This would enable the SEC (and other federal enforcement agencies) to use federal laws related to stocks for prosecution of the spammers, which bring long term jail sentences, and would also enable mail server administrators to block spam which does use the safe harbor language effectively without worrying about the spammers dodging their way around the filters by misusing caps, by words intentionally, etc.
They're probably trusting the received lines...
Of course only the one added by your server is trustable - the others can be anything the spammer wants them to be - including perfectly legitimate IP addresses.
I don't think so. Most of my spam is also aimed at a north American audience and my email address ends in .uk Mostly it is Viagra or similar, which would be illegal to ship to the U.K. Combined with stock manipulation stuff which is flat out illegal anyway, but pointless sending to someone in the United Kingdom when the stock they are trying to manipulate is in the U.S.A.
.uk address!!!) all that would be left would be phishing and AFF, at less than a tenth of the current volume.
If all this was removed my spam volume would be less than a quarter of it's current volume. If all the other foreign language spam was removed (I ask what is the point of sending say spam in Hebrew or Chinese or Korean to a
I remember the good old days of 50 hours for $50 on 56k. Ah, gotta love Cayman ;)
I used to forward spam to enforcement@sec.gov or whatever the email address was. My spam forwarding is semi-automatic. I still have to review every forwarded spam, but I don't have to mark the email as spam, set up the forwarding, or take any other actions. My mail client is KMail, and I've set up filters for spam. I'm on a lot of tech mailing lists, so I get a couple hundred spam messages a day sometimes, sometimes just a few dozen. My isp uses Spamassassin, and rewrites every incoming email header with spamassassin scores. He (my isp) bounces some spam automatically that score really high (over 15 or 20 maybe), but I've found virtually no false positives for scores 5 or above and sometimes less. So I've set up my filters to mark all incoming mail as spam if it has a score of 5 or above, any with a score of 4-4.9 as another filter, any with a score of 3-3.9 as another filter. The lower score filters are at the bottom of my filter list. The one with 5 or above is near the top. In between are key word filters for mortgage spam, stock spam, drug spam, diploma spam, and other spam. If they find enough of the keywords, the mail is also marked as spam. Due to the tactic of misspelling the spammers use, I have enough keyword filters to catch nearly every spam. The spam has to get by every filter, starting with the spamassassin score filters, the keyword filters, and other filters.
If the mail is flagged as spam, it is automatically tagged as spam, moved to a spam folder, a copy is set up to be forwarded to the ftc (spam@uce.gov is the current address, the UCE@ftc.gov is no longer working), if it is software spam, carbon copies of the forwarded spam are sent to piracy@microsoft.com, piracy@adobe.com, tip@macromedia.com, and personal inboxes at the BSA since they don't have an email address for reporting spam, they only have a form to fill out on their web site which I don't have the time for.
If the spam involves diploma mills or mortgages, the Department of State regulates and licenses mortgage brokers and schools in my state, so they get a cc of the spam that goes to the ftc.
After fiddling with the spam filters, rearranging them so they work very well, getting them to avoid false positives yet also getting them to move mailing list mail to the proper subfolders, I'm quite happy with the way its working. I only have to review my outbox to make sure all forwarded spam is really spam (and not automated responses from Microsoft answering about previously forwarded spam for example), and the spam is going to the proper addressees, then my only step is to send all the mail sitting in the outbox.
The FTC has stated during the last couple of prosecutions of spammers that they did use spam forwarded to them for their investigations prior to prosecution or settlement. I have no power over whether they prosecute or settle, but I suspect that the reason they changed the email address for receiving email has something to do with not wanting to receive any more forwarded spam for their current cases, and wanting to start over fresh for new cases with the new spam forwarding address. The changeover to the new address seemed to coincide with their announcements not too long ago about current spam cases they were about to prosecute or had just settled.
And whether the spam address or forwarding spam to the FTC actually works or not, I get some satisfaction whenever I forward spam soliciting software to the BSA, to Microsoft, to Adobe, to Macromedia, or for diplomas and mortgage spam, to the departments of state for my state. The departments of state are notorious in my state for being pitbulls when it comes to violations related to fake accreditation for schools, or for violations related to banking and mortgage laws for individuals and companies soliciting mortgages in the state, especially if doing so without a license or being deceptive about it. And any software reporting is also great because it will help drive more people to FOSS when they figure out they can't pay real
First, you have to be set up to even buy stock (not every Tom Dick or Harry is tied to a stock exchange or is equipped to be a day trader) then you have to be stupid enough to fall for the pump & dump scheme.
The rate of return must be damn near nil.
I say give up the fight against spammers and go after the clients instead.
Follow the money.
If somebody's supposed to benefit from this, let them pay $0.32USD per email that's sent.
Otherwise, I'm going to spam myself to promote my podcast.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
What with the great (fire)wall of china it is suprising that 3% spam actually goes through !
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
I ask what is the point of sending say spam in Hebrew or Chinese or Korean to a .uk address!!!
No kidding. I still wonder why I get so many Russian 'Learn to read english' spams in the U.S. I need a class just to read this Russian spam.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
Do you really think so? I bet it ends up in a gient queue for a quick automated "than you, and good bye".
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Actually, I've just realized that I don't know (apart from in the theoretical sense,) how its done or even how to get in touch with the kind of creature who does it.
:-)
Strikes me as a very closed off world. (Probably because of all the death threats.
Actually, the spamming (as opposed to the spammers) are highly vulnerable.
It would be easy to shut them down and/or fine them ($1.00 per email message) and have the various postal services collaborate to sue them into oblivion for mail fraud.
I don't imagine you'd find much political opposition to a source of free revenue. Somebody spams, the postal service in the country of origin collects the fines.
That would take care of the problem. Attempt to steal from me, you're an idiot. Steal from some tin-pot dictator in the process, you're mulch.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
good near-realtime stats at http://rss.uribl.com/
I've used cn-kr.blackholes.us with SpamAssassin to give extra points to messages originating in China and South Korea. Obviously it would make sense to do the same for Taiwan. However a query for tw.blackholes.us returns NXDOMAIN. I've also looked at countries.nerd.dk for a solution to this, but didn't see an obvious answer. Is anyone out there using a DNSBL to identify IPs in Taiwan? If so, what are you using?
It's true! My fiance is from Taiwan, and she's always telling me that I need to 1NCREA5E MY P3RF0R|\/|ANCE 1N BEDD!!!!!
I say we just nuke Taiwan. It's a small place, right? We must make sacrifices for the greater good...
Just because it can't be explained doesn't mean it isn't true. Science fits into reality... not the other way around.
So, you're trying to say that every single person living in the United Kingdom speaks and reads ONLY the Queen's English? Rather naive of you, don't you think?
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
The site identified correctly that addresses, you made a lame interpretation that it received bogus info, without reading nothing that was presented at the screen: "Broadcast addresses These addresses cannot (should not) be routed on the Internet." And "The IP is part of a reserved netblock and should not be sending any emails." And "First seen: Never"
Rokso keeps track of the major spammers. Most of them reside in the US, though they typically offshore their servers to other countries.
My other OS is the MCP!
I'd have to agree with that as I blocked a couple /16s this morning that were spamming the hell out of a client. Knocked out a couple /12s from Korea as well. Annoying bastards...
You're nothing; like me.
I, for one, do not consider Boca Raton to be part of the USA.
Stop using email. I'm almost ready to just turn off all my email accounts. RSS feeds, IMs, VoIP, and the telephone work much better anyway.
The above is not worth reading.
As someone else pointed out, the reason it's called an offshore banking account is because they don't live there.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
The message gets looked over by a lawyer.
"Ping - you have mail"
Lawyer - "Damn, more spam", *Delete*
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Shhh. Don't tell China - they might invade
I used to support TW's independance, but after reading this, I no longer support them. The deaths of a few million in slave labor camps is a small price to pay to stop SPAM.
Andy Out!
I just checked again and the site says "Reputation: Spam" for those IP addresses. I didn't make a 'lame interpretation'; that's exactly what I stated and that's exactly what's listed on the site.
He just did. Where do you think that came from?
oh - nothing to do with it being off shore then?
... I remember from when I lived in the US. 'Overseas' means anywhere not in the USA. IIRC, Mexico was considered overseas.
Oh, that's right
Actually, today I wouldn't count on that. That used to be true.
My research indicates that the largest junk faxers faxing stock touts are actually the company involved or closely related, in at least some cases.
The pink OTCBB stocks are not well regulated, so what those companies apparently do is just issue more stock to cover whatever is sold. It's fake.
They apparently make millions doing it, or at least thousands.
One player is reportedly named Tom Heysek. Google that name and you can read all about it. http://www.junkfax.org/fax/profiles/wsp/wsp.htm
.
"in at least some cases"
Sure, I'm not saying that some of them aren't doing their own marketing... but how do you even BEGIN to think about policing that? Or determining when they are or aren't involved?
The ROI just isn't there... too much work, too many unknowns, and too little gain to be had to justify the effort, IMO.
$0.02 (CDN)
That's a fantastic FAQ entry, but instead of redefining the word 'spam' (and consequently triggering the need for clarification in their FAQ), they could have just used more appropriate wording. Again, very sloppy- which is a reflection of what goes on behind the scenes.
For an example of how to do this right, go take a look at 'Senderbase'. They make no such assumptions about the intent of an IP; they simply provide you with the undisputed facts about the IP (network info, netblock owner, other networks owned by the same person, etc), plus the outbound email volume over the past day/week/month. I've been checking IPs there for years - whatever methodology they have in place for sampling network traffic, I can say from experience that it is consistent and accurate. Their website gives me a headache, but it's a small price to pay for a true peek into the looking glass.
Those who defend Trusted Source are either CipherTrust employees or have never used Senderbase.. and since I'm replying to an AC, my guess is the former.
The computer at that IP address has been compromised and is spewing 'bozo spam'. I got 3 of them recently for some kind of weightloss product.
[Victim email addresses have been sanitized -- except mine