FTC Endorses Bounty for Spammers
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The US Federal Trade Commission has given its endorsement to a plan that would reward insiders for information leading to the arrest and conviction of people or companies that produce spam.
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com. Spammers are trying to make their junk mail look more legit by adopting the same technologies intended to stem their message tsunamis, said a filtering firm Wednesday.
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The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission says the companies allegedly benefited from spam e-mail campaigns to hype their stocks.
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Over the past few years, computer crimes and annoyances have become an increasingly important part of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's work. In the past year, the FTC has announced settlements with spammers, adware distributors, and even Sony BMG Music Entertainment, over its distribution of rootkit software.
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The agency said this week that it had settled with a spammer who had failed to tell consumers they actually had to spend money to receive "free" products.
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Beware of any e-mail claiming to come from "frauddep@ftc.gov"--it carries a nasty payload.
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Lycos made headlines during the past several days by distributing a screensaver designed to swamp the sites of those deemed responsible for spam with traffic, in effect giving spammers, at least the companies that bankroll them, a taste of their own
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Nearly lost in the news about the&#160;U.S. Federal Trade Commission&#39;s (FTC) approval on Thursday of Google&#39;s acquisition of DoubleClick&#160;was another action by the agency: The publication of a proposed set of privacy principles governing online behavioral advertising.
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Blog: A U.S. Justice Department attorney says more criminal prosecutions of spammers are on the way, but will that warning deter would-be junk mailers?
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The FTC weighs the advantages of rewarding people for identifying spammers. It&#39;s a more complex calculation than you might think.
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A bounty system for catching spammers would need to offer whistleblowers rewards of $100,000 to $250,000 to be effective, the Federal Trade Commission said.
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A Norwegian commission has proposed a law that would punish spammers, or senders of junk e-mail, with fines and up to three years in prison.
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Let 'em know they're being watched US consumer protection body the Federal Trade Commission has backed a tightening of rules on internet advertising and the use of personal information. It has proposed stronger industry regulation of the tracking of users' habits.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Spammers have found a way to mine free Web-hosting services for cash. Online scammers have long used free hosting services such as Yahoo Geocities or Tripod as a way to get around e-mail filters that might otherwise recognize their spammy Web sites. But now some enterprising spammers have begun selling each other these free Web pages, according to security vendor McAfee Inc. For US$25 per week a spammer will sell 50 Web-hosting accounts that can be used to redirect Web traffic to sites that normally would be flagged. "These 'link providers' create and maintain thousands of free hosting accounts on behalf of the spammers," wrote McAfee's Nick Kelly in a recent posting to McAfee's Avert Labs blog. That posting can be foundÂ here. "They know that the bigger hosts are unlikely to get blacklisted because they have so many legitimate users," he added. Scammers also use the free Web pages to try to manipulate search engines, by making it look as if their Web sites are widely linked, said Adam O'Donnell, senior research scientist with Cloudmark Inc., an e-mail filtering company. And while the free hosting providers are taking steps to shut down this abuse, they appear to be fighting a losing battle. In late June, Cloudmark researchers were seeing about 1,500 phony URLs (uniform resource locators) on any given day on one of the most abused free hosting services (O'Donnell declined to name names). One month later, that number had jumped to 3,500. Spammers are simply able to out-pace the hosters' security teams, O'Donnell said. "They will gain more hosts for their pages than the company is able to take down," he said. The free hosters have been placed in a tough position because they do not want to shut down legitimate users, but they also do not have the technical resources to mine spam for Web pages that are being misused, O'Donnell said. Lately, however, the hosters have been partnering with security vendors to address the problem. Cloudmark is working with some hosting providers, hoping to sell them "reputation" information that tells them how many times their member URLs are being seen in spam. McAfee has been providing similar information to an undisclosed service provider, Kelly wrote. "This relationship has cut the abuse observed by us on that provider by over 90 percent in less than a week." He added, "let's hope those spammers are buying their new watches from pound$hop rather than Bolex this summer."
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Ask Eileen Harrington, associate director of the FTC's consumer protection bureau, questions about spam and consumer fraud on the Internet.
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The Federal Trade Commission yesterday gave limited endorsement to offering cash rewards to people who help track down e-mail spammers, suggesting that such bounties might work but in fewer
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A campaign by anti-spam groups has persuaded a large US net service provider to ban spammers using its network.