Posted on 05/10/2007 3:46:00 AM PDT by Clive
Up to 75% of all electronic mail is "spam" -- unsolicited junk messages sent out in bulk by scam artists. Given this deluge, it is the rare that any one spam message catches our attention, even for a moment. But spammers are a determined, occasionally creative lot. They would burn down an entire forest to roast a hot dog.
One particular bit of spam I just received seemed to merit more scrutiny than most. Addressed to a rarelyused corporate e-mail account, and received by no one else at the same firm, the e-mail seemed to originate on a Yahoo! account somewhere in the United Kingdom. It also read rather like a death threat.
"Some one that I will not like to tell you the name came to me and told me that he want you and the whole of your family dead and he provide us with your name, Address and Phone Number and with my network I sent my boys to track you down and they have done that," read the message.
"As I am writing to you now my men are monitoring you and there telling me every thing about you. So I will like to know if you Like to live or die as some one has paid for you to die. I am given you just two days to get back to me or I will just make a call and tell my boys to wipe you and your family out."
It was Monday morning, earlier this week. I read the e-mail, and then re-read it. Aside from the threat, it certainly bore all the hallmarks of one of those charming Nigerian Internet spam scams: fake e-mail account, bad grammar. But instead of inveigling an investment in some offshore venture, using flattery and guile, this e-mail took a comparatively direct approach: It was threatening to kill my family and, apparently, me. Hmmm.
I posted the e-mail on my Weblog, and asked if others had also received it. Within hours, dozens of people responded. Some urged me to contact the police; others suggested it was garden-variety spam and should therefore be ignored; some, like the rebarbative blog "Small Dead Animals" -- where a regular correspondent had earlier suggested that members of my family be sexually assaulted-- thought it was hugely funny.
I didn't take it all that seriously, to be honest. It was obviously a spam scheme. Who could possibly get hurt?
Then, two established Canadian bloggers --Steve Janke and "Bene Diction" -- wrote that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had been investigating similar threats in the United States. The "spammers," as the FBI put it in their press release, were "preying not on recipients' greed or good intentions, but on their fears." More than 100 complaints about the extortion email had been received by the bureau's Internet Crime Complaint Center in the first few weeks of 2007 alone.
According to the FBI, when a target angrily responds to the e-mail, the spammers know they have located a live account. They then respond with some unique information that serves to identify the recipient -- a child's name, a street lived on -- and the target perhaps becomes frightened. The extortion scheme then starts to yield dividends.
Spam, historically, is mainly just irritating. Whether initiated by a corporation to promote a product -- oftentimes, drugs, pornography or unwanted financial services -- or whether originating in an Internet cafe in the developing world, the stuff is truly a blight of our modern digital age. From a few hundred unwanted e-mails sent in 1978, to more than an estimated 90 billion sent every day in 2007, spam affects every one of us with an e-mail account. Microsoft's Bill Gates receives millions of spam messages yearly. Spam's economic cost is in the untold billions.
As most of us have discovered, antispam techniques are only partially effective; if one's countermeasures get too aggressive, they often end up filtering out legitimate e-mails. (Lesson: never use the word "Viagra" in any email you want to see delivered.)
What should be done? In Canada, we need to finally follow the lead of U.S. legislators -- who required in 2003 that spam senders observe certain basic rules: a subject line that tells the truth; no deceptive information in the identifying e-mail "headers" and a conspicuous display of the sender's postal address. Failure to meet these basic requirements renders the spam illegal. Such measures won't end spam --especially the offshore variety. But it will at least up the stakes for offenders by making them criminals.
In 2004, we had an Industry Canada spam task force that went nowhere. A report was written in 2005 that called on the federal government to engage ubiquitous "stakeholders" and to "continue to pursue a multifaceted strategy for stopping spam." A few anti-spam private member's bills have withered away; the Liberal leader, Stephane Dion, recently raised the issue in a speech. But real legislative action to target spam? Nothing.
As the uneasy recipient of a death threat against my family -- spam as it was -- I pledge my vote to the Member of Parliament who stamps out the scourge of spam once and for all. I suspect I'm not alone on this one.
- Warren Kinsella blogs for the Post and at www.warrenkinsella.com.
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Spammers should be taken out. They are some of the lowest forms of life.
It has worked so well here.../s
get gmail...
i get almost 0% spam in my inbox.
Thanks - great post.
At least the writer recognizes the problem ...
Now, if only we could get rid of the daily MSM spam. Er, spin. Rather, news broadcasts.
Gmail is good for keeping it out of your inbox....But, boy do they ever fill up my junk mail folder...!
me, too. Google is very agressive in fighting spam. You can see that in their Google groups as well.
Please send me a FReepmail to get on or off this Canada ping list.
You didn’t finish the thought:
Spammers should be taken out — AND SHOT!!!
That was on my mind, but I thought I would be a bit nicer.
My spam box gets about 50 a day. Based on the names the stuff is coming from and the subject lines, I can’t believe anyone would open ANY of this stuff. Must be total morons.
Rodneyta Yebovi Re:
Abdul Shaver — To kellerton at clayto...
Yvette Norton — With everhart here mescal
Florene — online meds
Liam Murphy — Need S0ftware?
Lashay Guillermina — Fast weight loss, Boo...
HUH? WTF are they talking about?
Canada needs to do something. The entire junk stock manipulation emails seem to originate at a couple of apartment buildings in Vancouver.
Truth is, large parts of the Internet are at the mercy of the spammers - especially the Russians. I call it an uneasy truce to avoid a war. The spammers are many times the same guys that run the botnets, that can generate crippling traffic and denial of service attacks. So ISPs and providers are stuck filtering the mail, not attacking the sources outright.
Attack of the Bots
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/botnet.html
I recently started a business e-mail account. At first there were the usual ‘keyword’ hits, using the words in the the account name. After a couple of months, I was flooded with *this woman wants to FU*, *pay for escorts* or *Lonely tonight?* e-mails.
I use Earthlink and they keep all of these e-mails in an offsite storage area. I can view them but, they never reach my e-mail account unless I want them to.
I get an actual 0% in my gmail box.
It is staggering how much information is available about people on the internet for free. Even more is available if you are willing to pay a modest fee. Given the amount these guys can get in a payoff, paying $25 for info about a “mark” is a good investment.
As an example, go to www.zabasearch.com and look up the name of someone you know. It shows all known addresses for that name. If you can narrow it down by birthdate, you can figure out where they are now (it is the listing with the phone number usually), and older listings get less and less detailed. If you want to pay $25, you can get to the more detailed databases, which can give you the names of family members, traffic records, loans, etc etc.
If I can tie your email to your name, and then spend about $100, I can probably convince you that I have people tailing you daily. If you were gullible, I could probably get you to pay several thousand dollars for me to “leave you alone”. Spend $100 to get $5000? Yeah, I could do that all day. If I net $20,000 a month, I don’t need to work. That’s only 4 people. I send that email to 10,000 a month, get back 100 “live” addresses, am able to get good profiles on 10, and get 4 or 5 to pay me off at that level, I am netting $19,000 a month, and all I do all day is surf the web.
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