Spammers, phishers, DoS-ers… the dudes and dudettes that give spice to our online existence and always keep us on our toes. Every medium with its problems, naturally, and while completely removing one threat is unfeasible1, minimizing its impact is attainable.
I don’t think there’s any merit in hitting back at the spammers with their own methods. There have been multiple attempts to do so and they all failed. The resources at stake [computers, mainly] are not limited and so one can recover from losses without a major setback in their operation. And while I’m all for justice, putting spam kings and notorious bot-herders behind bars hasn’t put my bulk filters out of stuff to do.
But - let’s look at motives, for a bit. I’m targeting spammers at the moment to further a short reply I made on another blog [Romanian]. I hear the profit rate is around 2% - that is, for all the spamming you do, if 2% of the people buy/sign-up/etc for what you’re advertising, you’re doing well. Some scams, like pump and dumps, can do even better. But that revenue must come from somewhere, right?
So, with a little bit of investigation and some word of mouth, we can boycott the manufacturers. Just because you can get a $500 gift coupon to Victoria’s Secret doesn’t mean they’re to blame - but, sometimes, we do get a simple match like that. The websites hosting all of these stores - some are registered by US registrars. Send’em a note, see them not do anything, don’t use the registrar for anything. Report splogs hosted on wordpress or blogspot. Shut down phishing websites.
I mean a lot of people see spam as something normal that they might not like. Same as pollution, poverty and pests. It’s there, it’s annoying but Joe thinks there’s nothing he can do to help fix things. He’ll try his best not to click on any links2 but beyond that he’s powerless. Which isn’t true. But, seeing how right now we’re busy educating people NOT to click on strange websites received via e-mail from strangers, I guess one can’t expect much to happen quickly.
