A New Approach To Reducing Spam: Go After Credit Processors 173
WrongSizeGlass writes "A team of computer scientists at two University of California campuses has been looking deeply into the nature of spam, and they think found a 'choke point' [PDF] that could greatly reduce the flow of spam. It turned out that 95 percent of the credit card transactions for the spam-advertised drugs and herbal remedies they bought were handled by just three financial companies — one based in Azerbaijan, one in Denmark and one in Nevis, in the West Indies. If a handful of companies like these refused to authorize online credit card payments to the merchants, 'you'd cut off the money that supports the entire spam enterprise,' said one of the scientists."
Frequent Slashdot contributor (and author of a book on Digital Cash) Peter Wayner wonders if "the way to get a business shut down is to send out a couple billion spam messages in its name."
Fight Fire with Fire (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Fight Fire with Fire (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Fight Fire with Fire (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Fight Fire with Fire (Score:5, Interesting)
I just tried it, and it fucking worked. I used a totally unknown e-mail account and just socially-engineered my brother.
I have ZERO faith left in humanity.
You're fucking evil and insightful.
Re:Fight Fire with Fire (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't bother. The processors have fraud detection systems that are sensistive to a few card numbers. Any processor tryng to spam the actual issuers will find out quickly it won't work.
Really.
But going after the few processors that serve the majority of spammers is not impossible. Perhaps better to answer the spam and buy stuff, then dispute the charges, and taint the spammers so much that the processors have to give up on them. And the spammers won't be able to just move to a new processor - they tend to share data on deadbeat 'merchants'.
Except this doesn't work well enough to deal with the offshore poker houses. Better to get the spammers labeled as illegal. Card issuers hate that.
Good luck. I'm not hopeful.