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International Spam Ring Shut Down
smooth wombat writes "An international spam ring with ties to Australia, New Zealand, China, India, and the US is in the process of being shut down. Finances of members in the US are being frozen using the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 while the FBI is pursuing criminal charges. The group sent spam advertising male enhancement herbs and other items using a botnet estimated at 35,000 computers, and able to send 10 billion emails per day. The Federal Trade Commission monitored the group's finances and found that they had cleared $400,000 in Visa charges in one month alone."
"Of spammy ring"
In the shower we sing,
While suds we fling,
Cleanshaven chin bring...
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
just stop buying stuff advertised by spam already.
An international spam ring with ties to Australia, New Zealand, China, India, and the US is in the process of being shut down.
China: > 1 billion people.
India: > 1 billion people.
USA: > 300 million people.
Australia: > 21 million people.
New Zealand: > 4 million people.
But the most important thing, we got mentioned!
bash$
Your post advocates a
( ) technical (x) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
(x) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
(x) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Hopefully this will turn out to be excellent news if they can indeed keep these folks shut down and away from continuing their spamming.
My concerns though are the 35,000 computers being used to spam. How long before they're found again. Or maybe they already are being all used by others. Is there any way of getting these machines repaired or otherwise reported to their ISPs? I figure if they have stats on how many machines, they have info on the machines themselves. Heck if they're setup to "receive updates" for software or holes or whatnot, maybe a nice white hat hacking to "update" the software so it self destructs the wide open hole and patches exploitable holes so they're safe?
Pancakes. Oh I blew it.
Does anybody know how exactly this spam works?
Say I own a widget company...i want to sell my widgets!! I know of this thing called "internet" that a lot of people are using, and decide that I need to utilize it to sell my widgets.
Do I just google for "email marketing"? Do I contact an advertisement agency?
Is there ANY sort of legitimacy involved in spam trafficking?
Do these spammers operate like real live businesses? Can I demand statistics on penetration from them? Do they have offices with receptionists and accountants and shitty corporate art?
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
If you still have a small penis, simply get a notarized note from your doctor stating it is so, and you can get your money back!
My favorite recent scam (not TFA mentioned above), as reported in the press:
$200,000 fines are being aimed at three of the offenders here in New Zealand:
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/8D970CCB86C6155ACC2574E200636699
The Mothership
Marge, get me a dozen cans of Spam and your Bundt pan...
In all seriousness, how do these people stay in business? Are they just charging and not delivering any product? If not, where are they getting the shit that they're selling?
And why can't some authority just make a purchase and then trace where the money's going to track them down? Is selling this pseudo-medical crap and prescription drugs even legal?
Please, please, please, please, please, please!
Running a botnet's gotta be a jail time worthy offense, right?
Investigators broke the case with a tip from the spam maps.
That's the thing that I've never understood with crime over the net. Ultimately the criminal is in it for the money, and over the net pretty well all money has to flow through the banking system (most likely credit card processing) at some point. It's obvious that these transaction systems are being monitored. Why don't criminal transactions get stopped immediately, or does it suit someone in a position of trust to let them continue?
An international spam ring with ties to Australia, New Zealand, China, India, and the US
Two of these are not like the others. One is known to be an unprosecutable Melamine Country, and the other is known as an unprosecutable Offshoring Country.
One can only guess who's going to get away with their crimes.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I'm still trying to figure out how they know that I have a small penis...
I'd like to believe that this will make a difference and I'll see my spam folder fill up a tiny bit slower. But I don't really think that this will make any lasting impact on the volume of spam getting forced upon us. I mean there are probably many actors lining up to take over these naughty boys business.
If it was hard to write it should be hard to read.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Message to all thingmakers:
100 years guarantee! Enlarge your something!
Quickly and easily our herb from the Asia jungles makes your thing something.
Don't be too upset if your thing is not something! We could make your thing something, dare I say thing-thing!
Our very herbal thingmaker approved by top thingmakers makes the mixture to make your thing to the thing-thing.
So open your thing to our thing.
Thank you.
- Arwen, I'm your father, Agent Smith.
- Well, you're just Smith, but my father is Aerosmith!
Have they really accomplished much here? If we RTFA (I know, we don't do that here on slashdot), there is a lot of hype and not a lot of clear progress. It looks like about half of the article is information that spamhaus already likely has. And if the botnet was ordered shutdown by an IL court, I'm not sure what use that would likely be.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
People keep thinking a big dick will solve their problems. Can't cure stupid!
Actually I'll believe they have found something when I suddenly see a third of the women walking around bowlegged and glassy eyed.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
You run mail servers for a couple decades you figure it out.
In all seriousness, how do these people stay in business? Are they just charging and not delivering any product? If not, where are they getting the shit that they're selling?
And why can't some authority just make a purchase and then trace where the money's going to track them down? Is selling this pseudo-medical crap and prescription drugs even legal?
You can ONLY buy with a credit card. The spammers do not clean out your bank account; that would cause the banks to have them murdered. They take $60 - $200 dollars and deliver either nothing or something useless like a sugar pill or a box of empty toner cartridges. You won't go to the po-po because they only charged you $200 or less.
"Officer, I was stupid enough to send my credit card information to an unknown spammer in order to get my tiny penis enlarged, but it's still tiny!" "HAWHAWHAWHAW write out a complaint Melvin!"
"Officer, I was stupid enough to try to order drugs/child porn/automatic weapons from some faceless spammer on the Internet and all I got in return was a box of garbage!" "HAWHAWHAWHAW we gonna search your house now Melvin... cuff 'im boys!"
They figured that CAN-SPAM meant that you "can spam" people. And usually, it does.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
In a few years when everyone upgrades to security hardened Windows Vista it will mark the end of spam rings and botnets.
Perfect! With all those credit card records, we can find out who actually buys stuff from spammers, and thump each one of them on the head.
It's the people who have difficulty with penetration who are spending all that money on those pills...
Three Rings spamming the Elven-kings for Cialis to buy,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords to refinance their home of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men lacking in size,
One for the Dark Lord reading his pr0n
In the Land of Mordor where the Spammers lie.
One Ring to spam them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to fleece them all and in their greed bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Spammers lie.
John
Some kinds of transactions are criminal - using stolen credit cards or selling their access information - but most of them are between willing buyers and willing sellers and can't be detected by dogs sniffing email packets at the borders.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
by about 2%
go team.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Does this mean I'll stop getting those bank account phishing attempts with the ugly yellowish background?
Or the stock tip ones with the nice, floating, pastel colored random text on a plain white background, with the actual message in plain black text?
I actually noticed the difference on my old Yahoo account. They would tag it about 5 times a day with biggerpenis.com pill ads. I did notice, however, that they didnt work on the weekends. I guess even spambots need a couple days off.
I mean come on, let's label this what it is, an organized criminal conspiracy, and let's bring the really harsh laws to bear on these people. The best part is all the assholes in legitimate business colluding with them get to be members of the same conspiracy.
Or is it a 3" piece of spam and some scotch tape.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
able to send 10 billion emails per day
That's almost enough to send a spam to every person on the planet twice. Even if some have more than one email address, there are a sufficient number who do not have an email address to balance that out. So I can only assume one (or both) of 2 things:
Either way, that's a tremendous amount of burden on the tubes. Quite possibly more spam from this one ring than all the legitimate messages in the same period.
Seems like a significant cost to legitimate businesses, and yet instead of a campaign of terror a la RIAA vs. the Pirates (another group of folks supposedly causing "significant losses" to an industry), companies pay ridiculous sums for spam filtering software.
I'm just sayin'...
Oh, was that my outside voice?
Can we get the list of all of those who paid for these things ($400,000/month) so we can eliminate them? They're the REAL cause of spam.
And it only took 3 million complaints before the FTC got involved!
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Yes, in the short term this might cut spam rates a little bit, but others will step in to fill the gap. The only way to stop spam is to educate people not to buy from it and the industry has been trying that for years.
Like all security problems meatware is the biggest fail point. People are just plain dumb a lot of the time, especially when they think they can get rich quick or get a bigger penis or set of breasts.
How can you make a Burma Shave joke on Slashdot, where most of the users were born at least a decade after the last sign came down?
Besides, the name of the country has changed since then:
I'm not exactly sure why, but a few months ago, I started receiving about 150 spam messages per day. A week ago, this deluge was reduced to its former trickle. When I first saw this article, I thought maybe it had to do with this spam ring being shut down, but the article was only written today. My best theory is that an individual botnet was recently disbanded. Does anybody who's up on internet security know why one person would (almost) just stop receiving spam?
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
They froze funds. One of the advantages that the FTC that a private party does not have when going after a spammer.
They did mention the connection to GenBucks, but not quite correctly. They also missed a couple of money processors, but I'll call Steve tomorrow.
Fight Spammers!
Spam would die if people realized the products being touted are available without the help of spammers, which are actually high-markup middlemen looking for suckers. For example, All Day Chemist is a favorite source of genuine generic Viagra in health-oriented forums discussing diabetes etc.. (healingwell.com, for example.) People buy counterfeit Rolexes from guys on street-corners, so where do those guys get them? Yeah, it's risky to admit where they come from, but if it were easy to find that info on the web, the middleman (egregious spammer) would suffer. People who fall for spam must do SOME web searching before giving up their credit card numbers.
j/k - glad to see we're making progress on the SPAM/UCE front :)
Yeah I already heard about this.. You see I got this e-mail.... Finally an end to 125+ per day in my spam box.
I'm not lazy on the weekends... I'm just Energy Efficent !!
"The Federal Trade Commission monitored the group's finances and found that they had cleared $400,000 in Visa charges in one month alone.""
Once Again, Consumers are left holding the bag.. The Federal Trade Commission only "Monitored" the groups finances and did nothing while $400,000.00 (!!!) was spent by the common idiot... But have no fear, because after the court case is finally settled, and class action lawyers will make sure that everyone gets a $5.00 off coupon on their next purchase of the next penis enlarging spam that crosses our in-box!
Meanwhile, the spammers will walk, laywers will get rich, and we are still stuck with trying to shutdown the botnet that will keep going without attention and will be hacked and sold to another competeing "spamking" by some nameless hacker/for/hire...
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
"This is pretty major. At one point these guys delivered up to one-third of all spam," said Richard Cox, chief information officer at SpamHaus, a nonprofit antispam research group.
Oh the irony: that CIO of an anti spam research group would have first name "Dick" and last name that rhymes with "cocks."
Maybe he got where he is now because he's bitter at being gypped by spammers!
"Hey, these pills said they'd enhance me, but they only enhance part of me. What gives?! "
Myanmar is the preferred usage, Burmese is acceptable, and to remind readers it was once called Burma when appropriate.
I will refrain from the obvious Times-bashing jokes.
See also: http://www.slate.com/id/2191002/
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
And you thought the "war on drugs" was futile...
But it won't work because:
Your post advocates a
( ) technical (x) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
(x) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
===
Yes, I realize that none of this applies simply become the application of the law is working at least where the law enforcement people are working. The point is that I rather hate this and other form-letter responses that I have seen on recently. The message these responses are sending is that no matter what is done, it won't stop or fix a problem. I cannot accept such a futile view of problems in the world. There have been discussions of these sorts related to many approaches to the spam problem including, but not limited to greylisting, MX record manipulations and other means to resist and reduce spam
The question of the election seems to be: personality cult, or no?
FOLLOW THE FREAKIN MONEY!
"cleared $400,000 in Visa charges in one month alone"
Any ideas how much money Visa gets from ALL the SPAM circulating?
Let's just say that it is more than enough to ensure that Visa, Mastercard and all the other companies turn a blind eye to it.
Without the ability to process money -- SPAMMers would be a thing of the past.
If there was no SPAM, how could they sell you anti-spam packages with their service...?
Do the math and see why this is so true.
If 1 sucker is born every minute then:
60 suckers are born every hour. (60 minutes)
1440 suckers are born every day. (24 hours)
525,960 suckers are born every year (365.25 days)
It's amazing how such a small minority of the general population is responsible for a problem of such magnitude.
...How many machines were running Mac OS or Linux/Unix?
How many were running Windows?
To quote Adam Savage: "Well, THERE'S your problem!"
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
I agree - it's amazing anybody responds to the spam, but lots of people must. I'm similarly amazed that people buy crap from telemarkerets.
My kingdom, my kingdom for a mod point!
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I'm pretty sure it's usually bogus. In fact, some of it isn't even intended to sell products. The obvious example is Google-bombing, where you use numerous links on sites that allow anonymous commenting to boost search engine rankings. I'm also pretty sure that some percentage of it is used merely to generate responses to find active email accounts and websites in order to generate improved spam lists to sell. Spam may be dirt cheap, but at 10 billion per day, even fractions of a penny add up when you get little improvements in response rates.
There's another form I don't understand that I call dead-end spam. Probably 10% of the spam I get on my personal website (currently averaging ~1000/day for a site with only around a dozen human visitors...ridiculous) don't even contain a URL's. Another insignificant fraction contain malformed URL's or even URL's that lead to sites unrelated to those advertised (it took a lot of guts for me to investigate this one). I've even found linked sites that are nothing but single-entry blogs with no external links.
An international spam ring with ties to Australia, New Zealand, China, India, and the US
Two of these are not like the others. One is known to be an unprosecutable Melamine Country, and the other is known as an unprosecutable Offshoring Country.
One can only guess who's going to get away with their crimes. It also seems that it's trollish to point out the facts.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.