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Fighting Spam Through Regulation and Economics

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the follow-the-money-stupid dept.

Bryan29 writes ""Next door to our offices was a spam operation... One day they weren't there anymore". Apparently in the past several months some black hat SEO companies (comment spammers) closed shop. Mr. Evron explores using a couple of case studies how spam was directly impacted by the UIGEA online Casinos law, disallowing payment processing, and how the subprime mortgage collapse made many former clients of spammers "move on". The article draws its conclusions from an economic standpoint "Perhaps the next step policy makers should take is to work to change this economy, possibly by legalizing and regulating ... More to the point, they can make the act of processing funds for this type of operation illegal.""

2 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Gadi Evron = Hot Air by arivanov · · Score: 3, Informative

    Just read the article.

    Gadi at his best.

    First of all, the casino SPAM has not decreased. It has changed target markets. I got 10+ mails over the last month that managed to get past my antispam filters with gambling spams and scams. This is compared to under 3 for the preceding year. Mortgages - that disappeared at least one year before the credit crunch started. And so on.

    The reason SPAM is decreasing is that the return on investment for spammers steadily decreases. People are responding to it less and less. As a result the vast botnets built for spamming are now geared towards phishing, identity theft (botnet ops are actually scanning computers for useable documents) and from time to time a bit of SPAM for the purposes of botnet expansion.

    --
    Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
    http://www.sigsegv.cx/
  2. Most of the registrars are now "bad" by Animats · · Score: 4, Informative

    If instead ICANN had some cajones, they could take the bad registrars out...

    The problme is that most of the registrars, by actual count, are now "bad". See the list of ICANN-approved registrars. There are several hundred, few of which have any real existence. Most are just fronts for some domaining operation. Some are obvious about it: "DropExtra.com, Inc.", "DropFall.com, Inc.", "DropHub.com. Inc", "DropJump.com, Inc.", etc., all of which are fronts for a "wholesale domain registrar". Then there's "Enom1, Inc."., "Enom2, Inc." ... "enom469, Inc.". Most of the "registrars" are now dummies like that.Those are ICANN's constituency.