A spammer in the US has been sentenced to nine years in jail. He was sending out 10 million spam emails a day and making $750,000 a month. So if you ever wonder why they bother...
Read the story here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4426949.stm
Spammer canned!
Spammer canned!
Paolo
Lay My Hat
Lay My Hat
I don't know why someone would be dumb enough to set up a spam service somewhere where they care enough to prosecute you. Its the ones who are spamming out of the countries who couldn't care less who will keep the spam comming.
There is a solution out there to can spam that I don't know why it hasn't been done: Just make it more "expensive" to send an email. So create a complex calculation or item attached to sending or authenticating an email which makes it take 5+ seconds to send an email. For us that isn't really a big deal but for the spammers 5sec * 10,000,000 emails would take almost 6 days to send. It would make the process much more expensive.
There is a solution out there to can spam that I don't know why it hasn't been done: Just make it more "expensive" to send an email. So create a complex calculation or item attached to sending or authenticating an email which makes it take 5+ seconds to send an email. For us that isn't really a big deal but for the spammers 5sec * 10,000,000 emails would take almost 6 days to send. It would make the process much more expensive.
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Alan Knighting
- Posts: 4120
- Joined: Mon Oct 18, 2004 7:26 am
- Location: Monflanquin, Lot-et-Garonne, France
Rich,
Nearly every single spam I get on my normal e-mail account originates from one country or another in Eastern Europe. The opposite applies to my HotMail account, they all originate in the USA. They are so painfully easy to identify I don't know why they bother.
Having said that WinXPnews reports "a man in Virginia has been convicted of spamming (the first felony spam case in the country) and sentenced to nine years in prison, although the verdict is being appealed. This was no ordinary mass mailer advertising legitimate products and services; Jeremy Jaynes was known as one of the top 10 Internet spammers and his spam messages were selling pornography and fraudulent services. According to the prosecution, plenty of people were falling for it, to the tune of $750,000 per month."
Maybe they are not so easy to identify after all.
Your suggestion appears to be a good one at first sight but what you are suggesting is simply to slow down the transmission of all e-mails, world-wide. To my knowledge, there is no one individual or consortium which has the power to do that.
I don't think that anti-spam software is any good either. All it can do is put what it thinks might be spam into a separate inbox. If it rejected what it thinks is spam one would inevitably miss "real" messages.
If everyone totally ignores spam then it will eventually go away.
Alan
Nearly every single spam I get on my normal e-mail account originates from one country or another in Eastern Europe. The opposite applies to my HotMail account, they all originate in the USA. They are so painfully easy to identify I don't know why they bother.
Having said that WinXPnews reports "a man in Virginia has been convicted of spamming (the first felony spam case in the country) and sentenced to nine years in prison, although the verdict is being appealed. This was no ordinary mass mailer advertising legitimate products and services; Jeremy Jaynes was known as one of the top 10 Internet spammers and his spam messages were selling pornography and fraudulent services. According to the prosecution, plenty of people were falling for it, to the tune of $750,000 per month."
Maybe they are not so easy to identify after all.
Your suggestion appears to be a good one at first sight but what you are suggesting is simply to slow down the transmission of all e-mails, world-wide. To my knowledge, there is no one individual or consortium which has the power to do that.
I don't think that anti-spam software is any good either. All it can do is put what it thinks might be spam into a separate inbox. If it rejected what it thinks is spam one would inevitably miss "real" messages.
If everyone totally ignores spam then it will eventually go away.
Alan
I have yet to receive any spam on my rental e-mails, because I am extremely careful to make sure they're only posted on the web in forms that robots can't recognize. For rental advertising sites I'm not sure of, I create a new e-mail identity, which forwards to my real e-mail, so that if spammers ever get those e-mails, I can just delete them and set up a new one.
For my hotmail and other accounts, the junk mail filters work pretty well. I have them set to filter out almost anything not explicitly approved of by me. I find that it's easier to sort out the rare legitimate-but-unsolicited e-mail from the spam and transfer it to my inbox, than to constantly sift through my inbox. My mother does the latter and she frequently deletes legitimate e-mails by accident.
I love hearing about spammers actually getting punished. But that guy must have been sending impressive numbers of e-mails to make $750K in a month!
For my hotmail and other accounts, the junk mail filters work pretty well. I have them set to filter out almost anything not explicitly approved of by me. I find that it's easier to sort out the rare legitimate-but-unsolicited e-mail from the spam and transfer it to my inbox, than to constantly sift through my inbox. My mother does the latter and she frequently deletes legitimate e-mails by accident.
I love hearing about spammers actually getting punished. But that guy must have been sending impressive numbers of e-mails to make $750K in a month!
Brooke
I read last year that 80% of spam comes from the USA, but a report from Commtouch found that the figures for 2004 were:I don't know why someone would be dumb enough to set up a spam service somewhere where they care enough to prosecute you.
1. United States 55.69%
2. South Korea 10.23%
3. China 6.60%
4. Brazil 3.35%
5. Canada 3.08%
6. Hong Kong 3.03%
7. Japan 2.46%
8. Spain 1.80%
9. France 1.23%
10. United Kingdom 1.20%
And these percentages show which countries host the websites referred to in spam emails:
1. China 73.58%
2. South Korea 10.91%
3. United States 9.47%
4. Russian Federation 3.5%
5. Brazil 2.23%
6. Argentina 0.09%
7. Canada 0.06%
8. Netherlands 0.06%
9. Australia 0.02%
10. Japan 0.01%
And what are spam emails selling? Not much porn, surprisingly:
Drugs - 29.53%
Mortgage/Refinance - 9.68%
Organ Enlargement - 7.05%
Shopping - 6.86%
Software sales - 6.11%
Financial - 5.87%
Work from home/jobs - 4.06%
Dating - 3.15%
Porn - 3.1%
Weight Loss - 2.62%
Beauty products/Health - 2.53%
Debt solutions - 2.48%
University Degrees - 2.43%
Vehicle Warranties - 1.86%
Paolo
Lay My Hat
Lay My Hat
Wow- takes your breath away!! The sad thing is that people are still being taken in by it allpaolo wrote:10 million a day, on an AOL account!vrooje wrote:that guy must have been sending impressive numbers of e-mails to make $750K in a month!
www.thepetitmanoir.com
The prescription drugs idea is very clever -- probably targets a slightly older generation that stereotypically is more susceptible to fraud.
It could be even worse because, at least in the US, many older people are paying out the nose for necessary prescription drugs yet can barely pay their day-to-day expenses because our social security and medicare system is so low on benefits -- and many of them lost a lot when the .com bubble burst. So 80% off prescription drugs may just be too tempting to resist.
It could be even worse because, at least in the US, many older people are paying out the nose for necessary prescription drugs yet can barely pay their day-to-day expenses because our social security and medicare system is so low on benefits -- and many of them lost a lot when the .com bubble burst. So 80% off prescription drugs may just be too tempting to resist.
Brooke