Elements of Spam
What is "spam"? For one thing, on the Internet, it isn't potted meat
made by Hormel. Spam is:
- Unsolicited. Bulk e-mail alone is not necessarily spam - nor is it
necessarily wasteful! Mailing lists are capable of reaching a lot of
people about a subject which they are interested in. However, some
spammers have recently been disguising their spam as a mailing list,
sprinkling their unsolicited mail with a "joke of the week" or a "fun
fact", and pretending that the recipients actually asked for the mail.
Don't be fooled. Valid mailing lists require you to sign up to receive
them.
- Bulk. Not all unsolicited mail is sent in bulk! If I make a post to
alt.war.civil.usa asking something
about the Battle of Chickamauga, and someone sends me a piece of e-mail
saying "Well, I know you didn't ask about this, but I'm wondering if you
found any extra info on a similar situation at Chattanooga..." then that
is not a piece of spam.
So what? Why is knowing this helpful to understanding the MAKE.MONEY.FAST
scam?
Unsolicited Electronic Mail
It is important to draw the distinction between pyramid schemes and chain
letters such as MAKE.MONEY.FAST and unsolicited bulk e-mail, or 'spam'.
The pyramid scheme, as we've seen, dates back far beyond the advent of the
Internet and electronic mail. However, the typical Internet MMF scheme
often involves mass e-mails. If, for example, 10,000 valid e-mail
addresses receive a certain scam file, and only .5% of the people in the
world are suckers (a conservative estimate, to be sure!), then the pyramid
scheme scammer will net 50 new marks! At $5 a pop, that's $250, well
worth losing your free hotmail
e-mail account for. This is much cheaper and easier than a mass 'snail'
mailing, which in the United States costs 33 cents per piece of mail sent.
(This payment also affords the bulk snail-mailer certain rights and
privileges which have been protected in the courts. We don't have to go
into it now.)
However, not all spam is MMF. A recent poster to news.admin.net-abuse.email
found that by logging into an AOL chat room, he received 1 piece of spam
every minute. About 99 percent of them were
advertisements for pornographic WWW sites. Programs exist specifically to
take advantage of AOL chat room code to scavenge valid e-mail addresses -
so many spammers have set up these programs that anyone who logs on and
does not take active steps to hide their e-mail address quickly fills up
their e-mail 'inbox' with unwanted messages.
Because of the attractiveness of bulk e-mail to the online MMFer, actions
taken against spam also end up cutting into the pyramid schemer. This is
why many savvy scammers have put 'NO SPAMMING' rules all over their
pyramid structure - since spam is easy to detect (and fraud can be
relatively difficult), they hope to be able to duck the abuse departments
of their ISPs by refraining from spamming and actively targetting people
on Usenet or the Web who appear to be new.
In general, though, as if there weren't already enough reasons to go after
dirty rotten spammers, the knowledge that pyramid fraud artists lurk in
their midst should spur people on even more. For more information about
pending and passed legislation regarding spam, check out the John Hopkins
University Cyberlaw website, an excellent resource all the way around.
This particular page only lists the federal statutes (several states have
enacted anti-spamming laws as well).
There isn't much case law on the subject of spam - what little there is
has mostly been brought by America On-Line's crack legal team, as AOL's
servers are very susceptible to spammers. All of the cases have been
settled out of court.
Back to the introduction page.
Jason Corley --
corleyj@cobweb.scarymonsters.net