And all that jazz

One of the nations top ten spammers received a 9-year prison sentence, and his sister who helped in the operation got a fine of $7,500. Reports indicated that they group of spammers amassed over $24 million from their email scams.

Today I received 46 spam email messages, and 13 important real emails. This is slightly higher than the average of spam messages I got three months ago. Even though the news of spammers getting heat from the authorities gives me hope of a spam free future, I still haven’t seen any results from the busts.

Now if I got part of the $24 million for reading all this junk, my story would be a different one. But I am still waiting on my check…

The amount of money the spammers were able to make with their junk mail is amazing. I don’t even give second glance to my spam mail before it is in the trash. Often times I can tell that a group of messages are spam and I can select a large group at once, deleting the trash without even having my computer waste its CPU power on the filth. I guess not everyone is tech savvy enough to see that these emails are scams done by individuals, and making a fancy looking email is very simple and easy to do.

Who did they make this amazing $24 million off of?

With this great of reward for spamming people, I can see why it has become such a problem. It is estimated that over 75% of all email is junk mail. This is a big problem when many of the valuable resources needed to process valuable meaningful email is bogged down trying to deliver spam messages that offer nothing more than inferior products and programs created to make the seller rich without having to do much work.

A lot of the spam I get is from fraud rings operating in Europe and other parts of the world. If they were to get a hold of my credit information, I would be wiped out, and have a hard time getting my money back from the untraceable source.

I think we need better education on the nature of email advertisements. If we were to set up strict rules for email advertising, and allow certain types of high quality ads from respectable sources, we might end up with a better Internet. Maybe we could have television commercials warning people of the dangers of spam, informing them what to look for in an email advertisement, and start some type of company research system where people could look up a company in an email ad and see if it is a respectable company or not.

If people could defend themselves against fraud, there wouldn’t be any money in it, and it would take care of the problem on its own. With each new email account we could send something much the same way credit cards companies send when you get a new credit card. (you know, that little pamphlet inside) To the end of spam!

		Save This Page