It’s not the death penalty as demanded by Stephen Landsburg for hackers, but the nine-year sentence handed down to megaspammer Jeremy Jaynes should mark the beginning of the end for spammers physically located in the US. But that’s small comfort, since spam can be sent from anywhere. A less mobile target can be found in the businesses that ultimately sell stuff through spam. These include some very large firms indeed.
I was struck, a few months ago, by an article in the Kansas City Star (free subscrption required, reprinted from the Chicago Tribune), which details the activity of a spammer, Ryan Pitylak, selling various kinds of insurance. The money quote (literally) is
Completed forms, in turn, are sold to agents of legitimate companies, such as IndyMac Bank, ADT Security and MEGA Life and Health Insurance. The agents say they pay $3 to $7 for each referral. (emphasis added) I can’t see anything legitimate about a company that employs criminal methods in its business, while pretending to be at arms length from the whole thing. It seems pretty clear that the way to make this kind of spam uneconomical is to make the employers of spammers liable for civil action. Estimates of $2000/employee, mentioned in the story,may be a bit on the high side, but the economic damage done by spammers is immense – more than enough to put firms like those mentioned out of business if they were forced to bear their share of the bill.
I thought perhaps these firms might be unaware of how Pitylak was getting his referrals, so I emailed them with links to the story1. Of course, I got no reply.
It strikes me that John Edwards has a bit of free time on his hands and that, if there’s one thing that could make plaintiff lawyers universally popular, it would be a class action lawsuit against the employers of spammers. Put me down for $2000, please, John.
Of course, this wouldn’t work so well against the purveyors of generic viagra, penis enlargement and so on, where the businesses are just as fly-by-night as the spammers. But every little helps.
1 BTW, it’s surprisingly hard to locate corporate email addresses for the purpose of making complaints like this. Perhaps they’re afraid of being spammed.