CAN SPAM Pushes US Spam Offshore

from the further-underground dept

Our story earlier today of a spammer who was caught and fined, only to flee the US and keep on spamming may be a good representation of what’s happening to the spam business as a whole. A new report says that the various crackdowns, lawsuits, fines and jail sentences against US-based spammers has actually cut down on the spam originating from the US. However, the spam volume from places like China and South Korea is “substantially up.” In other words, the spam has now been pushed offshore where it will be much more difficult to stop. Of course, with China so intent on only socially beneficial discussions occurring online, couldn’t they tweak the Great Firewall to at least stop a bit of that spam?


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Comments on “CAN SPAM Pushes US Spam Offshore”

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6 Comments
Rikko says:

No Subject Given

I smell the emergence of http://countries.nerd.dk popularity.

It should be pretty simple.. If one nation is responsible for massive spamming which is illegal in a nation, that nation can simply switch off incoming packets from that nation.

Maybe not so terrifying a prospect if Zimbabwe or Liechtenstein block access, but if a good number of US backbone internet firms decided no more traffic from China was coming in until they had it under control, I think Chinese ISPs would respond.

Happy user says:

No Subject Given

SPAM? What the heck are these people selling? Why not go after the people that the links refer too, and not JUST the actual persons spreading them — unless what you are talking about is useless emails that don?t make sense what-so-ever.

Am i too far off? Heck – those spam mails have to go have some sort or purpose, usually an advertisement for “something”. and “someone” is obviously paying for it….. not just the recipient (tong-in-cheek)

Pete Austin says:

Independent Figures from Spamhaus

Spamhaus, which is more up-to-date and also not looking for publicity in America to help sell anti-spam products, reports somewhat different figures for the number of spam issues for 12 October.

1. United States. 2456 (56%)
2. China. 527 (12%)
3. South Korea. 282 (6%)
4. Russia. 237 (5%)
5. Taiwan. 209 (5%)

I think Spamhaus tries harder to discover who is *really* responsible for the spam and it doesn’t seem to have changed much from last year. The spammers are just making more use of zombis (probably via several levels of intermediaries to make it “legal”).

Just one guy says:

Firewalling China???

You must be joking.

Not only this guy isn’t probably gotten outside of his own old shack in Nebraska or North Dakota or wherever except for once a day to the loo at the far end of his backyard…

… but, most probably, the server from which all his spam is coming isn’t physically in China either: it is much simpler to rent some server space from a server farm just anywhere, maybe in Togo or in Cayman or Barbados or something like that, and give it a chinese domain name to it.

Firewalling China (a whole 1-billion people country? Can you imagine???) wouldn’t do a thing for stopping this one guy.

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