Spam control should involve banks

Spam control should involve banks

www.h-online.com

Researchers in San Diego, Berkeley and Budapest have analysed the business model of spammers to find potential starting points for combating spam. They examined approximately 1 billion emails that were collected from various sources over three months in late 2010. The emails contained 93 million different URLs which originated from 17 million domains.

(visit the link for the full news article)


Related News Links:
cseweb.ucsd.edu
www.h-online.com

Is it a surprise that there's big money in computer spam?

Most of us have received spam, most still do. Those annoyingly persistent messages - many offering a single link that your curiosity might get the better of you. Some are poorly written one-liners about new 'treatments' for erectile dysfunction, or other such 'opportunities' to buy cheap pharmaceuticals.

I thought the nature of spam was such that it was going to be a permanent feature of our Internet landscape. After all there are so many service providers involved with resolving these spam links (although a full 40% appear to be registered to Russia's NAUnet, and another 10% to Romania's ISP Evolva Telecom.)

Apparently, though there are some very specific details about spam in general that make it possible to put and end to most of it...

As it turns out we can account for 95% of the financial activity from spam through a mere handful of banks.

....only 14 banks handled all the credit card payments involved. Two of them, Azerigazbank in Azerbaijan and St. Kitts & Nevis Anguilla National Bank in St. Kitts, worked for 14 affiliate programmes. Together with a third financial establishment, Latvian DnB, these banks reportedly handled 95 per cent of the payment traffic of all the investigated banks. The study also found that two German institutions, (B+S Card Service and Wirecard), were each active for one small affiliate program. Repeat purchases four months after the first ones showed that, although some affiliate programs had changed banks, the financial institutions used remained the same overall.

Imagine that. 14 Banks are the foundational element of 95% of the entire spam plague..... what to do, what to do?

... the researchers suggested the creation of a blacklist for banks who process credit card transactions for spammers. They said that card issuers should refuse to make any payments to the blacklisted institutions. As such a blacklist could be updated relatively quickly, the researchers concluded that this approach could dramatically de-monetise the affiliate programs behind the spammers.

The real question is how likely is it that Banks will be made to submit to such a "blacklist" and who would have the nerve to suggest it to them?

Most governments find it easier to chase people, than banks.

www.h-online.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Not just Banks & Spam, but I'd like to see all advertisers pay their real share for the bandwidth they hog. Why users get the blame and have to pay for all the bandwidth when advertisers eat up a large portion of it.

Looks like Ars Tecnica has picked up on this story...


A way to take out spammers? 3 banks process 95% of spam transactions
arstechnica.com...


A bit late... but at least someone is 'getting it.'