SpamAnti.net in April 2007

News of the world

'Pump and dump' scams come to Europe

Last month I was speaking about the pump and dump scams that are sued by scammers/spammers to manipulate share prices on the Stock Exchange and the reaction of the SEC. Now, a German company had the dubious chance of being the first European company hit by such a high-tech Internet-based scam.

See: The Inquirer.

News of SpamAnti.net

Question du jour

Question "I am looking for a software add-in to Outlook Express to automate signaling SPAM to the abuse departments of the responsible Internet Service Providers."

Short answer: If you find one, don't use it.

(Slightly) longer answer: The vast majority of the SPAM messages do not come from the visible origin. It is often impossible to know where they come from, and when the origin can be determined it is identified in a zombie PC (infected with a virus specialized in SPAM dissemination).

Taking this into account, complaining to the ISP abuse department is 99% useless since the apparently involved ISP is not even in the loop. This is so much so that most FAI no longer even read those complaints -except when they become statstically significant of something very unusual.

If you had such a tool, it would probably send 99% of useless email (knowing that most current evaluations show that SPAM is 90% of the world email, the cure would probably only worsen the global problem).

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