I am still baffled as to why this post from 2005 gets so much traffic!!!!
Oh dear. Last night “Dateline NBC”:http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3032600/ ran a piece on tracking down porn spammers. If you missed the piece, you’ll definitely want to check out the “MSNBC version of the show”:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8841299/ – *everyone* is going to be talking about this around the watercooler Monday. The feature (which long-time anti-spam activist Ray Everett Church “points out”:http://www.privacyclue.com/index.php/20050804/yours-truly-on-dateline-nbc/ was shot six months ago) starts when a Texas housewife gets zoo-sex spam and calls John Hockenberry instead of hitting delete. Hockenberry takes up the case and near the end of the “second page”:http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8841299/page/2/ we find out that:
Category: Privacy Issues
It must be human curiosity, but when the latest spam report came out from computer security expert Sophos I headed over to see, ‘what are people falling for now?’
The top spam categories are still medications (Viagra and its cousins account for 40%), and mortgages, but a growing concern is the rise in “pump and dump” schemes. These types of spam promote purchase of a stock with misleading or false information, sometimes ‘enhanced’ with real publication quotes to lend an air of legitimacy. Their aim is to target small companies with limited resources to combat such a campaign, elevate the stock price so that the spammers can cash out and leave investors high and dry and the company facing a PR crisis and worse.
Spammers exist only because there are enough people buying into their fraud. Many spam schemes are now run by the mafia, funding other nefarious activities including drug trafficking and arms dealing.
For the good of us all, isn’t it time to implement a user licence for the inbox?
New legislation coming into effect on Saturday will impact companies that selling online in Ontario or to Ontarians.
Here are some useful links to get you up-to-speed…