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Meet the Spammers
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Aug 07, 2002 07:30 AM
from the ask-them-for-viagra dept.
from the ask-them-for-viagra dept.
DaveAtFraud writes: "It took a little digging to find an on-line copy of this article that I first saw in my treeware daily newspaper. Thanks to the Salt Lake City Tribune for having it on-line. According to the Spamhaus project, a handful of people are responsible for 90% of the spam that clogs you in box. This is your chace to hear from them and what they have to say is quite interesting. If you don't think the filters and blacklists work, one spammer whines, "My operating costs have gone up 1,000 percent this year, just so I can figure out how to get around all these filters." Stopping spam is simply a matter of economics. When its uneconomical to send spam, people will stop sending it."
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This is *why* we need laws! (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, intelligent filters and the like are the best way to treat the symptoms, but they don't treat the problem.
Re:This is *why* we need laws! (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely agreed. I believe 90% of the unwanted spam we all hate so much could be stopped with a short list of simple guidelines.
1) If you apply an e-mail to an officially sanctioned opt-out list, it is illegal and subject to fines to e-mail an unsolicited e-mail to that address.
2) Make it illegal to send solicitations for age-restricted products (pornography, cigarettes, gambling, katmandu temple kiff...) to minors. Don't give me a free speech spiel. Go try and put up a billboard for hot rape sex porn. And for the people that bust this one: don't bother with the fines. Send 'em to jail.
3) Make it illegal for any business to solicit without providing as part of the solicitation a valid contact for feedback, or to misrepresent their identity by using false addresses/spoofed headers, or to provide an opt-out/emoval link that feeds into anything other than a sanctioned opt-out list.
4) Finally, and here's your free speech, make it illegal for ISPs to dump any spammer that complies with these laws, but also illegal to knowingly serve any spammer that does not.
There's not much point in moaning about these spammers being nasty clueless jerks. Listen: several THOUSAND members of the Municipal Credit Union, ordinary people from all walks of life, stole about $15 MILLION (!) from ATMs. They knew it was wrong. They knew they were taking advantage of the tragedy of the attacks on the WTC towers. At least some of them must have known they at least stood a chance of being caught. But they did it anyway. Because they could. People are greedy and always ready to make a special moral exception for their own crummy behavior.
BUT...
Because there are rational theft and fraud laws in place, something can be done about it... Like throwing the most egregious offenders in jail, and forcing the rest to pay back what they stole. With a little common sense legislation we can do the same to spammers.
Parent
Re:This is *why* we need laws! (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree with everything you said, except for this point. In my opinion, that violates the ISP's freedom of speech/association. Brick-and-mortar stores aren't required to allow customers to scream as they browse the aisles; it's an annoyance to the staff, and disconcerting to the other customers. Spammers use an incredibly high percentages of shared resources (those thousands of lines of Bcc:'s don't just transmit themselves, after all), and I don't think that ISPs should be made to host them, and really doubt the constitutionality of such a law.
Parent
Re:This is *why* we need laws! (Score:4, Funny)
Kinda like the kids who wrote DeCSS?
Parent
And yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet he persists.
In the great tradition of slashdot, I haven't read the article, but I assume he's making enough money to cover his costs and then some, else he wouldn't continue. Now, I'm also assuming that companies are paying him to send spam - there's no way he'd make enough of responders.
This has probably been said before, but why are we getting pissed off at spammers? It's the companies we need to "educate" as to the evils of unsolicited e-mail. That's where the money and motivation comes from. Maybe we should e-mail every company in the world and explain to them why they shouldn't spam...
Maran
Re:And yet... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not exactly. You won't see well established companies sending spam (ever received spam from IBM?). Spam is most of the times for fraudulent/make money quick products. If 1/10000 people fall for it these companies still make a profit and they don't care if they piss off the other 99.99% since they wouldn't be buying anyway.
Parent
Re:And yet... (Score:4, Funny)
Yes.
Ok, it was the internal newsletters when I worked for them, but I didn't want them...
Maran
Parent
Re:And yet... (Score:3, Funny)
My local mega grocery store gets tons of Spam from Hormel. Oh... Wait... Nevermind!
Re:And yet... (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, but you understand that businesses have a fundamental right to high profits. If we don't buy the pills or videos these guys will band together with other content providers (RIAA/MPAA) and buy legislation forcing us to prop up their failing business models. I see a convergence with MS and Intel, where your upgrades of Windows will read your spam and send money from your credit card to the spammers if you don't buy enough penis pumps. I for one don't want to see this happen, which is why I buy at least one degree from a prestigious non- accredited university a week.
Parent
From the article... (Score:3, Insightful)
A "paltry $250"!? That's more than most programmers (the ones who can still find jobs) make. The really sick part of this is that these guys are complaining that they're making only 90k a year sitting on their ass when hard working programmers can't find jobs.
Re:And yet... (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
I feel so low (Score:4, Funny)
You reaally oughta love this quote from a friggin' spammer of all people.
Re:I feel so low (Score:3, Insightful)
And Thomas Cowles isn't exactly of "high moral fibre", even setting aside his spamming.
The Origin (Score:5, Informative)
This AP article has been making the rounds. It's rather shoddy journalism in that it takes the words of the spammers completely at face value. Seeing as how Rule #1 is "spammers lie" you can imagine how well this approach works. [google.com]
Re:The Origin (Score:4, Insightful)
Weeeeelll..., not quite.
It does, as you noticed, quote exactly what the spammers say and claim. It does not explicitly call them liers. It does not extensively detail the position of the anti-spammers. All that lends itself to an article that primarily informs the reader of the position of the spammer.
But, it does not actually say that what the spammer is doing is right, legal, moral or anything else. It simply passes along their views. That is what unbiased reporting is about. If I read an article that outright calls spammers scum and claims they should DIE DIE DIE, I'd read that as a biased article.
There are plenty of articles around that detail how spammers annoy people, how they should be stopped, how they cost money, and on and on. most of these articles do not provide voice for the other side (the spammers). Would you call them bad reporting because of that?
Bias is not about supporting your position. Bias is about supporting any one position over another. Just because it doesn't support your bias does not mean it has the opposite bias. The middle ground usually looks hostile from either end, sort of the "If you're not for us, then you're against us" mentality.
Parent
Re:The Origin (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe it's the TV's fault. Maybe you've grown used to think about Dan Rather or Barbara Walters as journalists. They're not. They're celebrities. A journalist walks his beat, watches, listens and reports the facts. Just the facts.
I've interviewed murderers and rapists. I've also interviewed way more politicians than you'd ever care to meet. And when I come back to my desk and write the story, I simply report what they said. Nobody cares what I think about it; my job is to tell you what they said.
So, taking their words at face value is NOT shoddy journalism. It's real journalism. You, the reader, should decide what to make of their words.
Shoddy journalism would be to assume spammers lie, and mocking them, distorting what they said. It would be a lot more gratifying for antispammers, yes, but it would also be the worst kind of journalism: A distortion of the truth.
Parent
I got a great idea! (Score:3, Funny)
Lets put the spammers website addreses in a alshdot story.
The site gets slashdotted
The Router goes bust
The chips are fired
Repairing becomes a must
The Site gets slashdotted
Packets get a wannderlust
costs go high and high
and spamming becomes bust!
So no sweat guys its easy
What really needs to be done (Score:5, Funny)
is to not increase their costs but eliminate their profits.
What we should really do is start posting lists of the people who buy from spammers. Betcha you'd think twice about that penis enlarger then, wouldn't ya?There ought to be a law... (Score:3, Interesting)
The article claims this... and yet we see big spam houses fighting anti-spam laws left and right everytime they're proposed in the legislature for a state. And I seriously doubt they comply with the current anti-spam laws in the few states that have them -- since all they have is an email address and no state of residence information.
Frankly, I'm for a reasonable anti-spam law (one similar to the junk fax law, which has worked well). Obviously it's not as clear cut as junk faxes -- with them you can find out who sent you the junk. Spammers routinely obfusacate their information as mentioned in the article. I'm tired of the amount of spam I get, and unless you run your own mail server (something not viable for the vast majority of the Internet populace, and not even viable for the majority of the geeks) there's no way to block it.
Not that blocking really helps -- the bandwidth has already been consumed. The only thing blocking does is automagically delete it for you. I'd like the bandwidth back personally.
Must.....Stop....Fist..of.......Death.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Lets see:
1) you send mail people don't want.
2) they have to pay for it
3) it's legally questionable
4) (if you send porn) objectionable stuff will end up in front of children
5) And you're confused when we get pissed off.
DUH!
{goes rummaging for his clue-by-four and for the sourcecode for spamassasin... I need to tune my procmail filters anyway.}
Excellent news! (Score:5, Insightful)
whine whine (Score:3)
Yes I feel so bad for him. Um, hello. Apparently he doesn't know what he's doing to other people. And, apparently he never receives any spam himself. I don't think he understands. If so many people are so unhappy about spam and block him and others, causing his marketing cost to rise, doesn't that give him a clue? Spammers have used others bandwidth for their own purpose long enough; let them pay a little themselves.
Spammers fight back (Score:5, Interesting)
Yesterday I received a funny email that one of my clients was spamming. This email seemed to come from spamcop.net. What was starnge it was close to but not exeactly the warning typically sent by spamcop. So I sent them an email and here is the reply:
Spamcop spam is forged
Starting appoximately 12 noon EST 06 Aug 2002, spam purporting to be from spamcop (abuse@julianhaight.com) began being sent in an attempt to 'get spamcop in trouble'. This is a standard spammer tactic (joe job).
These messages were not sent by spamcop, and the claims made in them are false. Please disregard the email and/or block the originating IP address - 206.161.21.66 (cais.net). This IP has been blocked by SpamCop's blacklist since June. It appears cais.net is not responsive to complaints - their phone number (877-427-3368) leads to a computerized system with no attendant. It *may* be safe to block all of cais netspace: 206.161/16.
Please do not block mail from julianhaight.com or spamcop.net. If you cannot block by IP address, it is safe to block the origin email addresses, ( 'abuse@julianhaight.com', 'webmaster@julianhaight.com', 'webmaster@spamcop.net', 'abuse@spamcop.net') as no legitimate mail should be sent from these.
If you would like to contact someone at spamcop about this, you can send email to deputies@admin.spamcop.net. But please refrain from doing so. We are aware of the problem, and we are doing what we can to limit the damage. Unfortunately, since we're not responsible for sending it, there is little we can do to stop it.
More information on this career spammer is available from spamhaus.org
- SpamCop mgmt.
As you can see at least one spammer seems to be fighting back. You can also fing this on the web at http://www.julianhaight.com/forgery.shtml (I did not link directly to the site for obvious reasons. Maybe I should not even put this up?)
Mabey we should teach them a lesson and start refusing any connection from those IPs....
Ah, but to rub their noses in it.. (Score:5, Funny)
Dear interested spammer:
MEDICALLY PROVEN,
OUR PROGRAM WILL ENLARGE YOUR BUDGET,
NATURALLY........
You WILL Gain up to 1000% greater operating costs!
You WILL Get a larger budget!
You WILL Give your accountant MORE pleasure!
You WILL Stay IN DEBT, LONGER!
Most spammers see results within the 1st Month !!! Don't wait! CLICK HERE NOW!!! [spamhaus.org]
Answer the spam.. (Score:3, Funny)
Im not sure how effective it is to spam back at the spammers(most use anon email accounts), but it sure is fun. I actually got a couple of replys. One guy had spamed me with a mail trying to sell some sort penis enlargement pill.
I replied that i was hung like a horse, and it actually was a problem. Then explaining what a huuge problem it was for me, since i could only sleep with girls who have given birth to 3-4 kids. In the end i asked for a pill to make my penis SMALLER. Heres the fun stuff, he freaking replied on the mail. Telling me that he HAD a pill that made penis smaller, and how i could buy it.
I replied with a "christ, you're a idiot" and never heard from him again =D
I've also used this tatics before with a very "aggresive" danish religious movement(withnesses of jehova), who spends most of their time going from door to door trying to make people join them.
I told them i thought that Mary was artificially inseminated by aliens, and therefore our religon was something created by a higher race to make us calmer. It freaked the fuck out of them, and im pretty sure that they will NEVER knock on my door again.
Example: A email enters my
This article is just part of a series (Score:3, Informative)
Part 1: It's a war, and spam foes are losing [azstarnet.com]
Part 3: Anti-spam tools more aggressive but frustrated by e-mail's 'dumb' nature [chron.com]
"Stalker's" website (Score:5, Informative)
Growing a Spam Killing Community (Score:3, Informative)
1,000 percent? (Score:5, Insightful)
If someone has a spam filter in place, there is not *way*
they're going to buy your unsolicited crap. There's no point!
better than filters... (Score:3, Funny)
I remember the first spam I saw, back in '94, IIRC. Some lawyer selling immigration services. I ran a cron job that night that mailed him a core dump every 15 minutes. It didn't take long to swamp his mailbox.
The entire series from the SL Tribune (Score:3, Informative)
Part 2 [sltrib.com]
Part 3 [sltrib.com]
Spam avoidance tips [sltrib.com]
a web-marketing company came to me... (Score:3, Interesting)
what they 'said' (they make me understand the concept, but they never explicitly said it) was something like:
"We could send information about your company to users that could potentially be interested in your product, using some lists of e-mail addresses..."
And they asked for a price. Which wasn't that big.
So here is how spammers get paid: by convincing marketers that spam "might" be poiting customer attention to a website/product. And marketers go trying to convince CEOs and those who buy their services.
After all, spammers gets a little amount of money: why not try that, if it will cost you only few hundred bucks? from a company point of view, that's nothing.
And here the spammers get more and more money.
What I think would be needed is an article on some business-oriented magazine (say, the Economist, the Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal) that explicitly *tells* CEOs and other managers WHY AVOIDING SPAM MAKES YOU SAVE MONEY (sound like a spam mail, doesn't it?
Like talking to them with their own language. No need to talk about bandwidth, e-mail, filtering, regexp. Just concepts.
Is anyone willing to help me write such an article? maybe someone with connections in such business-oriented newspapers...
Enforce existing laws; get more support (Score:4, Insightful)
So is there any reason why we can't use existing laws against them? It may not be a federal crime, but at least under some state laws, it's a crime to show objectionable material to minors. Get the information on the spammer and report it to your local law enforcement authorities.
What about wire fraud or mail fraud, or just plain old fraud? If these spammers are registering for accounts under false names, why can't they be prosecuted under fraud laws?
Vigilante tactics have their place too, of course. Any ISP that claims to have an anti-spam policy but in reality cooperates with these spammers should have their entire IP range blacklisted. After their legitimate customers (if they have any) can't get to websites or send e-mail, and cancel their accounts, those ISPs will either go out of business or rethink their policies.
Finally, grass-roots operations are all well and good, but the anti-spam movement won't make any serious progress until we get some money in our corner. Find some large corporation that hates spam as much as we do. You can't tell me that workers in these corporations aren't getting spam - some of them are probably even reading it. In an era where every dollar counts (especially if you overstated profits for the last two years), some corporation somewhere must want to put an end to this as much as Joe Everygeek does.
The next step? (Score:3, Interesting)
Worm spamming. An outlook worm, which spams: it would connect to a website, get it's "instruction" (spam messages), then send itself along with the spam messages, to your outlook address list.
Now, which filter will be able to trap that, as it will always go to and come from legit addresses???
Scary.
Tone (Score:4, Funny)
All this article does for me is piss me off even more and make me want to block even more spam. I'll probably go out and dig up another couple hundred spamming domains for my blacklist.
Die spammers, die!
Detroit News Spammer Article (Score:5, Informative)
Meet the Spammers (Score:3, Funny)
The beginning of the story is a bit dull, but it gets better near the end. Skip to the middle if you're too impatient.
Basically, this guy/gal conned a spammer to have a meeting in Amsterdam, and was able to get the spammer on a webcam! The photos [geocities.com] are at the end.
(Yeah, slightly off-topic, but what the hell...)
Lock 'Em Up For Fraud (Score:4, Insightful)
Dave Codding, president of Internet Direct, an Ohio-based ISP, said his company struggled for a year to get Cowles off his network. Codding said Cowles used a false name to open an account and threatened to sue if he was cut off.
It is well-established law in the US, and probably most civilized nations as well, that using a false name for a fraudulent purpose is illegal. Specifically, it's illegal to use a false name to hide relevant information about your past (e.g. lousy credit, criminal record), which is precisely what these slimeballs are doing.
Somebody needs to convince a local DA to make an example of one of these crooks. Once it becomes too risky to use a pseudonym, it will be a simple matter of convincing ISPs to black-list them.
Re:Death penalty for Spammers (Score:4, Funny)
You know we couldn't pass a law like that. Well, maybe in Texas.
Parent
Re:Death penalty for Spammers (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Death penalty for Spammers (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Basic math (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Basic math (Score:3, Insightful)
Or the sheer of having to have an unlisted number with privacy options and even then having to constantly change your number.
Ever call Alan Ralsky? You have to leave a 5 second message(only your name) just to get him to answer his phone.
How exactly do you get new buisness when your affraid of who the next caller might be?
Expensive? VERY. It only looks cheap when you don't look at the hidden costs.
Re:is it Legal to Stalk Spammers? (Score:5, Funny)
I don't see a problem with it. They're in the business of unsolicited harassment too. Tell you what: if they want to opt-out of being stalked, I've got a fake email address that they can write to, and I guarantee that I'll take them off my stalking list.
Parent
Re:Mimes (Score:3, Informative)
If you're gonna raise swine, don't bitch about the smell. We don't want to hear about it. If you're gonna shout advertisements on a street corner, don't complain when everybody walking by is wearing headphones or hearing protectors. If you're gonna send spam, don't complain about people using blocking software.
Re:lack of regulation (Score:3, Informative)
A similar thing happenned to me. Someone had sent hundreds of threating e-mails to someone else and forged my address in the 'from' field. The municipal police in my area of Ontario, Canada interviewed me because they researched my domain name and I explained how the 'from' address meant nothing and that forgery of such things is common place.
The officer told me she did not know why they gave her this case and that she did not own a computer!
Re:Anti-spam law will not achieve much (Score:5, Informative)
BULLSHI!
Spamming is not speech - regardless of how many spammers tell you otherwise... free speech is the right to say anything you want.. it is not the right to force people to listen to what you say, and it certainly isn't the right to force people to pay to listen to you.
Spamming has nothing to do with the first amendment.
Parent
Re:You poor baby..... (Score:4, Funny)
"Well, things are not so bad; I can manage to unglog 25 outhouses per week nowadays, and business is actually booming, thanks to all that junk food", said Balan, a former spammer and junk e-mailer.
The only problem, he says, "up here in the muskeg, are those damn black flies and those drunken prospectors who shoot at me even if I have an appointment to unclog his outhouse". That's because he's forced to change truck every week because he cannot afford a new one.
But that's not his least of worries. Every so often, the bomb squad has to be flown-in because of a suspicious package destined for Balan arrives in the Post-Office. They are usually packages of dead rotten rats or opossums, but sometimes there is some catshit or worse. Everytime, the community points at him because the Post-Office has to be cordoned-off, which wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't also the local watering hole. And, everytime, the municipality has to pick-up the bill, so, for a few time, Balan had to fend-off some angry sober prospectors with prized bottles from his private collection.
Parent
Re:I feel so sorry for this guy (Score:4, Interesting)
Relentless anti-spam vigilantes have hounded the 35-year-old head of Empire Towers Inc., plastering Cowles' home address and phone number all over the Web. Spam recipients call to tell Cowles how they feel.
"These people will go to the lowest depths," said Cowles, of Bowling Green, Ohio. "I have some phone clips that would make you sick."
Ahem...
You want to talk about going to the 'lowest depths'?
Parent
Re:WHAT!!!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Try telling that to a mother whos 5 year old son has just opened a "Chicks with d**ks" spam e-mail and followed the friggin link!!!!
Actually, I wonder what mother in her right mind would let a preschooler use a computer with a network connection and email. The TV is not a babysitter, and a PC is definitely not built for users without judgement.
If parents would take an active role in raising their kids, then they wouldn't fall victim to the entropy of exposure to inappropriate subjects.
The problem is not the porn on the net, it's the parents who don't take responsibility for their children.
Parent