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AOL Awarded $7 Million From Spammer
from the that-sounds-good dept
Well, down goes another spammer. AOL has been awarded $7 million from a spamming operation that violated a court order to stop spamming their customers. It's good to see these large awards against spammers, as maybe it will make some spammers realize that it's not worth doing what they do. However, what's more likely to happen is that spamming technology will get even better, making it much more difficult to track these guys down.
Reader Comments
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Raising the barriers to entry
Sure, some spammers will get more sophisticated. But it will discourage entry-level spammers from entering the game. There are a good number of truly clueless spammers who advertise a porn site, then forget to include the link.
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Re: Raising the barriers to entry
I can't believe I'm agreeing with Dorpus, but he's right. On average, I receive at least 5 spams a week promising me some reward (money, bigger penis, cheap viagra, etc) but include absolutely no way to contact them to actually get the product.
Recently I started receiving e-mails about those teeny-tiny remote control cars that are "the hot thing this Christmas" and I got 5 or 6 in one day all with the same contents but different return addresses and subject lines, but none of them contained information about actually getting a car. What a complete waste of bandwidth.
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Bizarro world when I side with AOL
I hate to take the side of the big megacorporation on anything so it's with reluctance that I'm happy for AOL now. If they hold their promise to "use all of the legal and technological tools available to shut down spammers," then it should help the problem some.
I still hold firm that the easy way to shut down a ton of spam is to go after the companies whose goods & services are promoted. They're paying for the spam "service" to get people to buy their stuff and there's almost always a way to contact them to give them your money. Make it illegal for them to pay for a service that sends out unsolicited email and you'll put a huge dent in the demand and most spammers will go out of "business."
And while the goofs or whatever that you guys mention when no contact information is provided would still get through, they seem to be the exception rather than the norm. Maybe it's a new trend, but I would have to guess that effectiveness drops buy a few orders of magnitude when there's no direct link to purchase so at some point, they should realize the return on investment isn't worth it and they'll go away.
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