FTC: Most Spam At Least Partly False

Email

from the well,-duh... dept

The FTC has spent some of their precious time analyzing all those spam emails people send them to work out that almost every spam they get has some false or misleading information. For most of us, this seems completely obvious. However, this is important due to the lack of any comprehensive anti-spam laws. Right now, realistically, the only way for the FTC to go after spammers is to get them on charges of false advertising or using misleading information. So, the fact that almost any spam can qualify means that they can go after almost any spammer. Of course, they don’t have enough resources to go after very many spammers, but there is still some hope (naive as it may be) that if enough spammers get thrown in jail and/or fined severely, it will convince them to think twice about their chosen profession. In a somewhat related note, yesterday I received the first spam that I’ve seen that was actually labeled with a [spam] tag at the beginning of the subject line.