Follow The Money To Track Down Spammers
from the will-it-work? dept
Every time the "how do you stop spam?" debate comes up, people always come up with the suggestion of going after the people selling things via spam. Since there needs to be a direct connection to the seller in order for them to get money, they must be more easy to track down - and to shut down. Of course, a lot of spam these days isn't actually selling anything, any more, but are part of more elaborate scams. The other problem I have with this approach is that as soon as it becomes common, the spammers will just start sending out random "free" spam emails that advertise legitimate sites to get them in trouble, and make it more difficult to pick out whose really responsible for paying for spam.
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Steps to winning
2) $1 fine per SPAM message sent with an additional $5 fine per SPAM message complaint forwarded to the FTC/FCC/Appropriate governing body paid to the original SPAM recipient in the form of cash - no vouchers, discount coupons or mail-in rebates. This encourages people to send out less aggravating SPAM *and* encourages recipients to do something other than just hit delete.
3) Payment of $0.01 to me for each SPAM message sent to cover licensing and royalties for developing the system.
Oops, off to the patent office...
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