CAN SPAM Pushes US Spam Offshore

from the further-underground dept

Our story earlier today of a spammer who was caught and fined, only to flee the US and keep on spamming may be a good representation of what's happening to the spam business as a whole. A new report says that the various crackdowns, lawsuits, fines and jail sentences against US-based spammers has actually cut down on the spam originating from the US. However, the spam volume from places like China and South Korea is "substantially up." In other words, the spam has now been pushed offshore where it will be much more difficult to stop. Of course, with China so intent on only socially beneficial discussions occurring online, couldn't they tweak the Great Firewall to at least stop a bit of that spam?
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  1. identicon
    Rikko, 12 Oct 2005 @ 6:29pm

    No Subject Given

    I smell the emergence of http://countries.nerd.dk popularity.

    It should be pretty simple.. If one nation is responsible for massive spamming which is illegal in a nation, that nation can simply switch off incoming packets from that nation.

    Maybe not so terrifying a prospect if Zimbabwe or Liechtenstein block access, but if a good number of US backbone internet firms decided no more traffic from China was coming in until they had it under control, I think Chinese ISPs would respond.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    dorpus, 12 Oct 2005 @ 7:10pm

    Significant Barrier

    Few Americans are willing to live in China, the Americans that do live there stick out like a sore thumb, and most locals speak terrible English, unable to send effective spam themselves. 99.99% of spam in China is in Chinese, selling snake oil cures or sex services or whatever.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. identicon
    Happy user, 12 Oct 2005 @ 11:30pm

    No Subject Given

    SPAM? What the heck are these people selling? Why not go after the people that the links refer too, and not JUST the actual persons spreading them -- unless what you are talking about is useless emails that don’t make sense what-so-ever.

    Am i too far off? Heck - those spam mails have to go have some sort or purpose, usually an advertisement for "something". and "someone" is obviously paying for it..... not just the recipient (tong-in-cheek)

    link to this | view in thread ]

  4. identicon
    Pete Austin, 13 Oct 2005 @ 1:46am

    Independent Figures from Spamhaus

    Spamhaus, which is more up-to-date and also not looking for publicity in America to help sell anti-spam products, reports somewhat different figures for the number of spam issues for 12 October.

    1. United States. 2456 (56%)
    2. China. 527 (12%)
    3. South Korea. 282 (6%)
    4. Russia. 237 (5%)
    5. Taiwan. 209 (5%)

    I think Spamhaus tries harder to discover who is *really* responsible for the spam and it doesn't seem to have changed much from last year. The spammers are just making more use of zombis (probably via several levels of intermediaries to make it "legal").

    link to this | view in thread ]

  5. identicon
    Douglas, 13 Oct 2005 @ 8:33am

    Re: No Subject Given

    As I understand spam. The spammer is payed just like a website. They are payed on clicks or a bit of the sale. It is often a real company that is against spam on the surface that is paying them not some company that they own.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  6. identicon
    Just one guy, 13 Oct 2005 @ 8:36am

    Firewalling China???

    You must be joking.

    Not only this guy isn't probably gotten outside of his own old shack in Nebraska or North Dakota or wherever except for once a day to the loo at the far end of his backyard...

    ... but, most probably, the server from which all his spam is coming isn't physically in China either: it is much simpler to rent some server space from a server farm just anywhere, maybe in Togo or in Cayman or Barbados or something like that, and give it a chinese domain name to it.

    Firewalling China (a whole 1-billion people country? Can you imagine???) wouldn't do a thing for stopping this one guy.

    link to this | view in thread ]


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