Does The EU Have Jurisdiction Over Email Scammers In Nigeria?
from the didn't-think-so dept
The EU's certain to have spammers and email scammers shaking in their boots with the news that consumer-protection bodies across the continent are now working together to stop international email scams. "Joined-up enforcement across the EU will help to stamp out scams and leave the sharks with nowhere to hide," says one politician. Nowhere to hide, indeed... except outside of the EU, maybe. See, the thing about the internet is that it's a global network, and you don't have to be anywhere near a particular place to target people there with scams and attacks, regardless of what the politicians think. Spam, phishing and other email-based problems aren't going to be solved by legislation or government intervention. In the first place, it's ineffective, and even if it weren't, the scammers would simply pick up their digital sticks and operate from somewhere else with a less aggressive regulatory environment. Dealing with spam and email scams demands technical solutions -- blocking and stopping the messages, or other approaches -- and social ones -- getting people to quit buying from spam and to stop falling for phishing and other scams. Legislative and regulatory solutions that help solve the problem, rather than make it worse, are hard to come by. But again, that's not important when there's a chance for politicians to make themselves look helpful.
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no easy way
Long answer - no way! But for complex reasons. Stick with the drug trade anology for a moment. Qui bono? Or "follow the money".
There's a vast grey area here. I can't see any government or trading bloc attacking the spammers at root, because the "legitimate" cold marketeers are too tied up in the whole process.
Killing the demand might help. The most effective way to destroy the spammers would be to out-compete them, say by reducing the price and increasing the availability of what they offer. That means allowing the over the counter sale of V14g12a and w4r3z :) Not going to happen is it?
Black markets exist because "white" markets are over-regulated. If you legalised dope, cocaine and heroin overnight and allowed people to grow and sell their own the international drug markets would collapse. The reason this does not happen is too many powerful interests are mixed up in profiting from that trade.
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it'll be a cold day in hell before that happens. a technical solution is the only apparent approach. some people hate to hear this but here it goes: the majority of people are too stupid to realize what they're doing. seriously, as "mean" or "arrogant" as it comes across, it is the cold hard truth. the aol user base is the best demonstration of this. phishing was running rampant on aol. aol sent out e-mails and posted plenty of warnings everywhere telling people never to give out their personal information. did the majority of people listen? needless to say when aol put up "The AOL staff will never ask for your password or billing information." on the IM window, all you had to do was add "Please disregard the warning below" to the phishing line you used to try to hook them and they bit. i could imagine it's even worse now that phishing scams involve actual web pages. either way, you should be looking for a technical solution; a social solution is inevitably going to fail because, despite a very low cutoff point, intelligence of some sort will be needed to discern whether someone's cast their bait at you.
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Re:
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Re: Re: misanthropic humanist
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IP addresses?
I ask because why doesn't the EU just block all Nigerian IP addresses? Problem solved. They do this type of thing for kiddie porn all the time, why not egregious spam?
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Re: IP addresses?
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Re: IP addresses?
All expatriate will be held at bay. No business. The US will probably surfer. OIL. REMEMBER!
Beside there are humans also trying to break free from this so call Nigerian curse.
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How about they send out a lot of spams too, but if people go to the spam sites they get a YOU ARE STUPID AND DON'T DO THIS
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that is a defeatist attitude
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So how should
When the EU tries to enact legislation that would help it confront spammers then you say the correct solution is to use blocking instead.
Are you taking contradictory positions? It appears to me that you are more interested in opposing whatever our legislatures are trying to do, rather than coming up with a coherent position on how objectionable activities of any sort should be prevented on the internet.
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Re: So how should
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Re: So how should
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Regulatory Solutions
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I NEED SOME INFORMATION
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