Our government at work
Is this typical,or what?
Since the Can Spam Act went into effect in January 2004, unsolicited junk e-mail on the Internet has come to total perhaps 80 percent or more of all e-mail sent, according to most measures. That is up from 50 percent to 60 percent of all e-mail before the law went into effect.
Only the government could screw something up this bad. Regardless of what proponents of this legislation claim, the proof is in the pudding. Only the government could describe a twenty to thirty point increase in spam traffic as anything but a failure.
One young entrepreneur who was recently hit with a judgment against him in the amount of $1.4 million has this to say:
“There’s way too much money involved,” Mr. Gillespie said, noting that his service, which is currently down, provided him with a six-figure income at its peak. “And if there’s money to be made, people are going to go out and get it.”
Well, yeah. If you are willing to be a criminal there are many ways to make big money. But like the old saying goes, if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime. But supposedly these guys are hard to catch due to the layers of anonymity built in to the spamming process.
Even if only 2,000 of 200 million recipients of a spam campaign - a single day’s response rate for some spammers - actually go to a merchant’s Web site to purchase a $50 bottle of an herbal supplement, a spammer working at a 25 percent commission will take in $25,000. If a spammer makes use of anonymous virus-enslaved computers to spread the campaign, expenses like bandwidth payments to Internet service providers are low - as is the likelihood of anyone’s tracking down who pushed the “send” button.
The overlapping and truly global networks of spam-friendly merchants, e-mail list resellers, virus-writers and bulk e-mailing services have made identifying targets for prosecution a daunting process. Merchants whose links actually appear in junk e-mail are often dozens of steps and numerous deals removed from the spammers, Mr. Jennings said, and proving culpability “is just insanely difficult.”
But wait. Didn’t we already crack this nut over fifty years ago when Al Capone was successfully prosecuted for tax evasion? Follow the damn money. Even if the merchants can not be held liable for the spam, they should damn sure be made to disclose who were paid commisions.
Until these anti-social anarchists are hit with penalties that match the magnitude of the loss caused by their illegal activities, estimated at about $50 billion, this scurge will never go away and the wonder and promise of the internet will fade into the realm of what could have been.