According to a variety of online sources, unsolicited email - otherwise know asspam, is responsible for up to 90 percent of all email messages sent and received. A pair of high profile spam lawsuits and prosecutions are shining a spotlight on the tactics used by spammers and the efforts of legitimate email providers to thwart them.

In the first case at hand, a Detroit man is accused of fraud and money laundering charges after he admitted to earning over $3 million by sending millions of unsolicited email messages to inflate the price of certain Chinese stocks and then selling the stacks at a profit.

Mr. Ralsky is accused of using not only illegal email spamming means such as botnets, but also many legal means of tricking email recipients such as: placing false and misleading headers in the email messages, using proxy computers to disguise the email’s source, and using falsely registered domain names to send spam - thereby implying that the emails were legitimate.

The second case involves an International spamming ring that the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation recently announced was considered to be the world’s largest spam operation.

According to published reports, The Federal Trade Commission filed a temporary restraining order and complaint against two defendants in the United States District Court of the Northern District of Illinois for ”deceptively marketing a variety of products through spam messages, including a male-enhancement pill, prescription drugs and a weight-loss pill”.

How can you prevent spam??? Use a good spam filter, either software or hardware based. Protect your e-mail address by not providing an email address on any user forums or other online community sites. Also, make sure your antivirus and antispam software is up to date and kept current. You should also have an email package which includes spam and virus filtering from your provider, so that you never end up getting spam in the first place.

For unwanted e-mails from known contacts, most e-mail clients support blacklisting. This will allow you to add the sender’s address to a list and will stop you receiving any e-mail from them. Configure your mail client and spam service provider with this information so that the message gets deleted in your inbox or before it reaches your inbox.

 

Tags: Federal Bureau of Investigation, Spam, United States District Court

This entry was posted on Friday, January 23rd, 2009 at 10:24 am and is filed under eLaw. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.