Son of Spam

[Anathema]

Behold, the greasy, beady-eyed face of spam. This creep is getting 9 years in the slammer for filling inboxes with bogus scam adverts and other violations. I hope his cellmate is 6' 8", 375 lbs., covered in tatoos, <6 teeth, and likes his sweeties a little on the chunky side....

He allegedly made US$24,000,000 playing his little
games...

 

[scribble]

So let me get this straight -- this guy sent you, and probably quite a few others -- some junk mail... which you could trash without reading --

And in retaliation, you're hoping he gets raped by his cellmate?

People are right when they say there's a Spam problem. The problem is how people get so completely worked up about a few words someone sent to you.

I say this as someone who gets hundreds of spam mails a day. Anal rape is not a punishment that fits the crime.

 

[Anathema]

No, I hope his cellmate if very sweet to him, and he never has to do anything against his will. But, I don't write the rules on how prisons operate. He had the chance to avoid whatever happens by not being a scam artist.

He's ripped people off with scams to the tune of $24million; deleting his emails won't get them their money back. He's earned his ride to the Big House, and authored his own fate. My sympathy for him is quite low. Sue me.

 

[Soapy Sam]

I've never really understood the hatred of spam. I found junk snail mail far more annoying.

If this man really made $24 million by sending spam, I have to wonder why he is being jailed instead of standing for high political office.

 

[El Greco]

I find spam VERY annoying. And I know I'm not the only one. There is a reason that so many people hate spammers. I also hate spam snail mail, people who knock on my door to proselytize me, commercialists who flood the TV program, phone salesmen who call 5 times a day when they already have my number illegally, spam SMS from restaurants (they have my number from reservations I made) or from phone companies, etc. Many times, those people are not just spammers; they also promote scam and thus are involved in much more serious crimes. Yes, I can avoid all those people pretty easily, but other people can't. Besides they are multiplying exponentially they are consuming more and more of my time. They are continuously desrespecting my privacy and I happen to value my privacy pretty high. They have to be punished hard; the laws are getting stricter and stricter because the problem is getting bigger and bigger.

 

[Wally]

There is a huge difference between spam email and spam snail mail. Like it or not the snail mail spammers have to pay to use the system whereas the email spammers are a huge expensive parasite.
I think punishment should be cumulative, granted the annoyance to one person may be minor resulting in a small punishment but if you annoy a couple hundred million people you punishment should be a multiplied by a couple hundred million.

 

[evildave]

Multiply that by hundreds of emails each, BTW.

I'm sure the people who don't mind getting their email spammed also don't mind getting phone calls fifteen times a day by other people with similar scams, hmmm?

I'm less annoyed by spam than the ineffective countermeasures against it, like email filters that occasionally eat an important piece of email while it's gobbling spam.

Or Hormel suing people for typing 'SPAM' instead of 'spam'.

 

[Soapy Sam]

Dave there seems to be quite a difference on this issue between the US and UK.
Here in the UK, we do have a register (the Telephone Preference Service and it's equivalent the Mailing Preference Service) funded by the direct mail companies themselves. If you register with these, your details go on a database which makes it plain to direct mailers and cold callers that you do not want to hear from them, so they are wasting money attempting to contact you.

Since registering with both MPS and TPS, I have seen my junk mail fall to a few items per week and calls to almost none. In general, only very small operators don't subscribe to TPS or MPS rules.

As for spam, I mainly use Hotmail for email and by restricting incoming mails to an exclusive list , I rarely see spam at all in my inbox. I have a couple of other accounts which only a few folk know about- I get no spam there at all. I also have a junk account I use to register with online sites. That gets maybe ten items a week, which I clear monthly. It takes about a minute.

I'm no computer guru. If I can reduce nuisance email so effectively and so easily, I am left wondering why others seem to find it such a problem.

 

[Anathema]

The people who get the most upset about email spam are the people who have to deal with the effects of the illegal tactics mass-mailers use to deliver the mail. From my end, it's not what ends up in my inbox that bothers me. It's the behind the scenes problems spam causes.

I've worked as a network and email systems engineer work for clients ranging from large banks and "mom and pop" manufacturing shops. I've dealt with the chaos they cause. They are burglars, thieves and con-artists --- not just "litterbugs", as some people seem to believe. Several of the virus/trojan/worm programs that have plagued the internet for the last few years are actually remote tools that spammers use to find their next relay victim. This is not a mere nuisance.

The tactics spammers use to hide their tracks cost victimized organizations money. Spammers routinely violate the security of systems, steal bandwidth, and slow down or even crash systems that someone else is paying for. Then, to top it all off, this elaborate underground of stolen, untraceable email services delivers deceptive or even fraudulent scam emails. Spam is the ASCII face on a much larger body of criminality....plain and simple.

edit: typo

 

[Soapy Sam]

Anathema- I grant everything you say. My point though, is that if the spam does not get through to it's intended target, at least the commercial part will wither; so instead of moaning about it, we, the recipiants, must block it- which seems much simpler than it was a few years ago.
As I say, if I can do it, anyone can. It's easy.

Most people now have virus checkers, firewalls, spyware programs, why can we not educate users to block email spam effectively?

Whether this would stop the simple witling who does it for fun-well that's another matter. It seems to me the only way to stop all spam is to find a way of charging for it. You will then only get it from rich idiots. (Read "Corporations")

But I see the issue from my viewpoint as a home user, so I am largely ignorant of the big picture. Probably, so are most of us.

You clearly know a great deal about this. Why not start here by giving us at JREF a symposium on the facts of the matter and what we can do to protect ourselves? Education has to start somewhere.

 

[El Greco]

If I can reduce nuisance email so effectively and so easily, I am left wondering why others seem to find it such a problem.

For the same reasons that I find homeopathy to be a big pain in the a$$. I'm not fooled by it personally, but the idea of crooks acting uncontrolled is not exactly calming.

 

[Soapy Sam]

EG- I don't see an exact parallel. There are two problems with spam-
The message, which may be false or even dangerous.
and
The process, which ties up resources.

Hmm- maybe I do see your point, but in the case of homoeopathy, I think problem 1, the message, outweighs problem 2, the resources wasted. With spam, I think it's the other way around.
Nobody believes the stuff. Few even read it. It's the resource wastage that does the damage- which is what Anathema clearly knows about.

 

[Anathema]

You clearly know a great deal about this. Why not start here by giving us at JREF a symposium on the facts of the matter and what we can do to protect ourselves? Education has to start somewhere.

Symposia are bit beyond my time constraints, at the moment --- perhaps a digest instead?

As evildave noted, there are tools that block/filter spam, but they can throw the baby out with the bathwater every now and then, and are not possible to use in every case. Filters have gotten markedly better in the last couple of years, but they are nowhere near perfect. When you are dealing with large organizations, even a few lost "important" emaills can cause major headaches -- particularly when dealing with business clients who now rely on email with all the confidence (perhaps misplaced) of snail mail.

In small business settings where I provide email server implementation, I steer clients toward a solution that works at the server. My favorite is SpamAssassin, which uses a clever ranking system to "sniff out" spam. It reads all mail as it enters the server, and can be configured to park the mail in designated area, send it on to the recipient with the title modified to include a {SPAM} tag, or simply deleted. On my own business server, I have come to trust it so much, I simply have it delete what it thinks is spam --- it hasn't failed me yet.

You seem to be doing all you can already as a conscientious user -- I tip my hat. The measures you take are top notch -- particularly the "junk account".

You would be amazed at the paranoia some people experience when you suggest intercepting their email --- they'd rather get 200 Viagra come-ons per day than risk missing one important email. Also, believe it or not, many people actually enjoy getting some advertising sent to them, and spam filters can't do much to discriminate between the come-ons you want to view and those you don't. For these people, filtering becomes an unworkable affair. I'd love to think that spam could be solved by simply filtering it at the endpoints, but I don't believe that covers the entire range of problems it causes.

Since spammers are now a sophisticated criminal enterprise, they need more aggressive countermeasures. The fact is, spamming reaches a lot of people, and allows them to make a lot of money -- they won't sit still while people try to thwart them. Email addresses are gold to these people, and they go great lengths to procure new ones -- even breaking into databases and stealing them. If you have an email accout that doesn't get much spam, they would absolutely salivate over getting your address. Eventually, they very well might. The real key to ultimately stopping the criminal practice is enforcement.

I really applaud the State of Virgina for implementing tough and sensible laws, and backing them up with a stiff sentence. No doubt it will make the underground more clever in the short run, but hopefully we can make the business unprofitable in time. At the very least, they can no longer operate in a realm of ambiguous law and ultimate impunity.

Geez, I can geek-chat about this crap all day...but duty calls

 

[Rat]

So here's an idea. A bit of a Utopian and unrealistic (tautology?) one, but an idea nonetheless.

The telephone and mail direct marketers have, as has already been noted, started a 'voluntary' code (and yes, that means they volunteered to avoid being forced) of opting out. We could have a similar scheme for email, but it would have to be international. How about emails that are unsolicited and commercial having either a flag set, or a marker in the subject line, announcing that that is their purpose. Now I know that few would abide by such a scheme, but if it were done so that spammers who do obey the scheme are not given draconian sentences, and those who don't are, it's not that difficult to produce a mail client that also includes the opt-in/out option.

Wouldnt stop spam, and I wouldn't intend it to. But it would mean that spammers who are given long gaol sentences have no cause for complaint, as there is a simple way to avoid them.

Just a thought.

Cheers,
Rat.

 

[Soapy Sam]

Anathema- thanks for taking the trouble. (I am mightily complimented by the approval of one who knows his stuff).

It's the old "False positive" filter effect that's the problem, I gather- not a problem for a home user like me, as email is unlikely to be critical if missed.

I'm surprised that commerce relies on it to any great extent. I was told some years ago, by one who knew, that an email should be seen (in security terms) as equivalent to a postcard.

That has remained my baseline assumption. Perhaps, as a result, I'm more cautious than I had thought.

 

[1inChrist]

I hope his cellmate is 6' 8", 375 lbs., covered in tatoos, <6 teeth, and likes his sweeties a little on the chunky side....

It's nice to see where atheists stand morally.

 

[wipeout]

Trying to think up punishments that do fit the crime, how about a computer speaks spam e-mails into his cell for a couple of hours a day for the 9 years?

 

[Benguin]

Might be relevant to know how he got this $24mill. Was it fees collected for the unorthodox advertising method, or money he scammed from the gullible with 419s and the like?

 

[Anathema]

Might be relevant to know how he got this $24mill. Was it fees collected for the unorthodox advertising method, or money he scammed from the gullible with 419s and the like?

Sorry, I read a lot of articles, but ended up posting a link to the only one that focused on the spam, not the scams he ran from behind the spam. He offered fake "work at home" schemes and non-functional software that did nothing it claimed.

Here's a better link

Google "Jeremy Jaynes" for more perspectives.

 

[Benguin]

Sorry, I read a lot of articles, but ended up posting a link to the only one that focused on the spam, not the scams he ran from behind the spam. He offered fake "work at home" schemes and non-functional software that did nothing it claimed.

Here's a better link

Google "Jeremy Jaynes" for more perspectives.

OK, well I think those work at home schemes are a particularly despicable way of preying on the desperate. It isn't the case the victims deserve what happened through fecklessness or greed, merely a hurdle of the level of sophistication employed to target some people.

I will, therefore, not concern myself too much about the moral dilemma of his new career retrieving the soap from the shower floor.

Straightforward spam is a parasitic irritant that does more than just annoy email subscribers. These guys are one of the big security headaches and account for a major amount of traffic across networks. In other words, they add cost to everyone's use of the internet. Use of spam can, in a variety of ways, serious cripple businesses and organisations of all sizes as much of their business relies on compromising other peoples' hardware to use as infrastructure.