Posted on 04/01/2005 12:24:21 PM PST by Maceman
OK. I've had it with spam. I have posted my thoughts on why it should be outlawed on this thread.
But the question is, how can it be done and enforced without having the feds take over the Internet. Here is my suggestion from the above-referenced thread to kick-off the brainstorming session.
If you think this idea sucks, fine. Feel free to come up with something better.
But here is my contribution to get the ball rolling.
The federal government sets up a reward system for information leading to the arrest and conviction of spammers. If you get a spam message, you go to the website, you use a credit card or paypal to make a transaction for whatever is being sold. You turn your receipt along with the original spam message and the unopened package with the spammer/vendors information on it over to the feds, who then notify your credit card company of the transaction.
A law would be passed requiring card issuers to turn over the specific merchant's bank account information to the feds, charge the offending account for the amount of the transaction, issue a credit for the original sale amount to the cardhodler who reported the transaction and cancel the merchant's card account.
At that point, standard money laundering laws would allow the feds to track the flow of money until the perpetrators are caught. Once convicted, the original cardholder would be entitled to some type of reward (flat fee, percentage of assets confiscated from the spammer, or whatever.)
I don't really have time to figure out the details of how this approach would work, but certainly something along these lines could be developed, with little or no intrusion of the government into the actual workings of the Internet.
The general idea is that there are already enough laws that allow the government to follow the money trail from the consumer to the spammer (or the spammers' clients), and so it must be possible to trace the transaction flow and find the perps. All that is needed is the will.
Obviously, there are bugs to be worked out (for example, what happens if 50 million spam recipients take the same action in order to collect 50 million reward payments).
But if it is possible, as we have seen, to force or entice the card companies not to process transactions from Internet-tobacco sellers who don't collect and pay sales tax, certainly the card companies could be enlisted in this battle against spam as well.
Submitted herewith as a start to a grass roots brainstorming session about how this problem could be solved once and for all.
Forgot to mention that I believe spamming should be labeled a Class A felony and a threat to national infrastructure, with sever criminal penalties including long prison terms and asset forfeiture.
I'd give a spammer several cups of my personal bone marrow before I'd give him any of my credit card numbers.
I though about that as well. But if the incentive is large enough, maybe some will do it. Or perhaps there could be some type of program that individuals could sign up for, kind of a volunteer anti-spam force, where they could be given cards with special account numbers just for this purpose, or in some other way be protected.
And what about those scammers that just take your money and run (temporary web sites, e-mail accounts)? You're out the money you paid for the item.
I've been using a white-list filter for awhile, so only people I know can email me. I don't especially care who I'm missing, but it's not like I'm running a business anyway.
One thought might be to get a credit card company to generate big lists of valid-looking but nonfunctional credit card numbers. Drive the spammers crazy trying to process orders that never get paid.
From a reply here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1306815/posts
They still have to have merchant card accounts, and bank accounts. They could still be traced, and the money could still be recovered by the card company, or the bank. After all, credit card companies make good on consumer card fraud all the time. Or, as an alternative, see my suggestion for special "volunteer force" cards just for this purpose.
Now that's the kind of positive thinking that I expect from my fellow freepers. Good suggestion. That's what brainstorming is all about.
That way, when the spammer runs the card, it could red flag the card issuer immediately.
SOunds like it could be a piece of the answer.
Agreed, but what is your suggestion to the issue of how to catch them?
OK, as long as you include slow, painful public torture.
I'll all for something that sends an electric charge back to the spammer, at ever increasing voltages.
But that's just me.
How about a bug-me-not style site that generates apparently "real" credit card numbers that the fed uses to track the spammers down?
Relax everybody! Before you go running off with your pitchforks just setup SpamAssassin and PostGrey on Your Linux Mailserver with Postfix and you will rid yourself of 99.5% of spam. I used to get 600 spams a day. Now it's down to 3 or 4. SpamAsassin does realtime checks of blacklisted mail servers and spam heuristics and Postgrey makes bulk emailing tools ineffective. Unfortunately the best most people are doing is client side Bayesian filtering which sucks and their ISPs are incompetent.
I'm sure an incentive could be set up to encourage that kind of thing, but frankly, my next door neighbor could be the spam king of the universe, and I would have no way of knowing it.
Forget regulation, go to www.pobox.com get an account there have it forward your email to your REAL email account and never give your actual account out to ANYONE....
POBOX.COM will filter out the spam and only deliver stuff that gets past their filters... and if you change email provders you never have to change your publicly listed email address, you just change where you have POBOX.COM forward the mail to.
Spammers are criminals, and passing more laws won't do much. Plus, many of them operate overseas, so US law won't have much impact on them. The solution to the problem will be technical more than legislative.
Here's a site that has some helpful information: http://www.spamhaus.org/ .
There is also an extension to SMTP that requires authentication, which, if widely adopted, could also make some headway into the problem.
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2554.txt
Yeah. It gets rid of spam, but I'm sure also gets rid of non-spam a-mails as well. Besides, I don't think that consumers and businesses should be responsible for getting into an "arms race" with spammers, where the new technology comes along, and they figure out a way to beat it, and then the consumer hs to contiunally upgrade.
The reason there is spam is because it is so cheap to do. What we need to do is make it prohibitively expensive for spammers, and criminal sanctions and enforcement will go a long way towards accomplishing that.
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