How to aware these internet spams

Internet spam?

Spam is flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it. Most spam is commercial advertising, often for dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes, or quasi-legal services. Spam costs the sender very little to send -- most of the costs are paid for by the recipient or the carriers rather than by the sender.

There are two main types of spam, and they have different effects on Internet users. Cancellable Usenet spam is a single message sent to 20 or more Usenet newsgroups. (Through long experience, Usenet users have found that any message posted to so many newsgroups is often not relevant to most or all of them.) Usenet spam is aimed at "lurkers", people who read newsgroups but rarely or never post and give their address away. Usenet spam robs users of the utility of the newsgroups by overwhelming them with a barrage of advertising or other irrelevant posts. Furthermore, Usenet spam subverts the ability of system administrators and owners to manage the topics they accept on their systems.

Email spam targets individual users with direct mail messages. Email spam lists are often created by scanning Usenet postings, stealing Internet mailing lists, or searching the Web for addresses. Email spams typically cost users money out-of-pocket to receive. Many people - anyone with measured phone service - read or receive their mail while the meter is running, so to speak. Spam costs them additional money. On top of that, it costs money for ISPs and online services to transmit spam, and these costs are transmitted directly to subscribers.

One particularly nasty variant of email spam is sending spam to mailing lists (public or private email discussion forums.) Because many mailing lists limit activity to their subscribers, spammers will use automated tools to subscribe to as many mailing lists as possible, so that they can grab the lists of addresses, or use the mailing list as a direct target for their attacks.

Why is spam bad?

There are several reasons:

The free ride. E-mail spam is unique in that the receiver pays so much more for it than the sender does. For example, AOL has said that they were receiving 1.8 million spams from Cyber Promotions per day until they got a court injunction to stop it. Assuming that it takes the typical AOL user only 10 seconds to identify and discard a message, that's still 5,000 hours per day of connect time per day spent discarding their spam, just on AOL. By contrast, the spammer probably has a T1 line that costs him about $100/day. No other kind of advertising costs the advertiser so little, and the recipient so much. The closest analogy I can think of would be auto-dialing junk phone calls to cellular users (in the US, cell phone users pay to receive as well as originate calls); you can imagine how favorably that might be received.

The ``oceans of spam'' problem. Many spam messages say ``please send a REMOVE message to get off our list.'' Even disregarding the question of why you should have to do anything to get off a list you never asked to join, this becomes completely impossible if the volume grows. At the moment, most of us only get a few spams per day. But imagine if only 1/10 of 1 % of the users on the Internet decided to send out spam at a moderate rate of 100,000 per day, a rate easily achievable with a dial-up account and a PC. Then everyone would be receiving 100 spams every day. If 1% of users were spamming at that rate, we'd all be getting 1,000 spams per day. Is it reasonable to ask people to send out 100 ``remove'' messages per day? Hardly. If spam grows, it will crowd our mailboxes to the point that they're not useful for real mail. Users on AOL, which has a lot of trouble with internal spammers, report that they're already nearing this point.

The theft of resources. An increasing number of spammers, such as Quantum Communications, send most or all of their mail via innocent intermediate systems, to avoid blocks that many systems have placed against mail coming directly from the spammers' systems. (Due to a historical quirk, most mail systems on the Internet will deliver mail to anyone, not just their own users.) This fills the intermediate systems' networks and disks with unwanted spam messages, takes up their managers' time dealing with all the undeliverable spam messages, and subjects them to complaints from recipients who conclude that since the intermediate system delivered the mail, they must be in league with the spammers.

Many other spammers use ``hit and run'' spamming in which they get a trial dial-up account at an Internet provider for a few days, send tens of thousands of messages, then abandon the account (unless the provider notices what they're doing and cancels it first), leaving the unsuspecting provider to clean up the mess. Many spammers have done this tens or dozens of times, forcing the providers to waste staff time both on the cleanup and on monitoring their trial accounts for abuse.

It's all garbage. The spam messages I've seen have almost without exception advertised stuff that's worthless, deceptive, and partly or entirely fraudulent. (I include the many MLMs in here, even though the MLM-ers rarely understand why there's no such thing as a good MLM.) It's spam software, funky miracle cures, off-brand computer parts, vaguely described get rich quick schemes, dial-a-porn, and so on downhill from there. It's all stuff that's too cruddy to be worth advertising in any medium where they'd actually have to pay the cost of the ads. Also, since the cost of spamming is so low, there's no point in targeting your ads, when for the same low price you can send the ads to everyone, increasing the noise level the rest of us have to deal with.

They're crooks. Spam software invariably comes with a list of names falsely claimed to be of people who've said they want to receive ads, but actually consisting of unwilling victims culled at random from usenet or mailing lists. Spam software often promises to run on a provider's system in a way designed to be hard for the provider to detect so they can't tell what the spammer is doing. Spams invariably say they'll remove names on request, but they almost never do. Indeed, people report that when they send a test ``remove'' request from a newly created account, they usually start to receive spam at that address.

Spammers know that people don't want to hear from them, and generally put fake return addresses on their messages so that they don't have to bear the cost of receiving responses from people to whom they've send messages. Whenever possible, they use the ``disposable'' trial ISP accounts mentioned above so the ISP bears the cost of cleaning up after them. I could go on, but you get the idea. It's hard to think of another line of business where the general ethical level is so low.

It might be illegal. Some kinds of spam are illegal in some countries on the Internet. Especially with pornography, mere possession of such material can be enough to put the recipient in jail. In the United States, child pornography is highly illegal and we've already seen spammed child porn offers.

Spammers do more than spam

In addition to all of the bad things spammers do to your mailbox and Usenet, they are also dishonest and unethical. Spammers have been documented as stealing other site's domain names via forgery - both reply net and concentric net have been hit this way. Indeed, outer net was actually attacked by one such spammer.

12 Sep 2001 - Spammers are soliciting donations for relatives of the victims of the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks on the USA. We at spam.abuse.net do not believe that any of these relatives will see any of that money.

The spammers have a new trick - they supply an offshore phone number that you are supposed to call to be removed. The call costs $2 per minute. Sometimes they play a tape directing people to CAUCE, in what appears to be an attempt to discredit us.

One trick the spammers tried is to set up fake anti-spam sites, or to forge e-mail from anti-spam organizations such as CAUCE. Neither CAUCE, as an organization, nor any anti-spammers, as individuals, are soliciting or accepting donations of money or any other valuable consideration. Another earmark of just such a forgery is use of a throw-away or invalid e-mail address. If you see a supposed anti-spam e-mail or a web site that is asking for money, it's a fake. Report it to your nearest anti-spammer.

Spammers lie to their customers. For example, Quantum Communications claimed to mass music an innocent customer, that they'd send a mailing to people who'd asked to receive info about new products and services, not to thousands of unwilling spam recipients. Now Mass Music's made thousands of new enemies who will never buy from them after to being spammed, due to Quantum's misrepresentations.

Another, similar, lie is to sell someone a mailing list and tell them that the people on it want advertising e-mail. Most of the time, the list is one of the same old spam lists that's been around five years. There are a very few lists of people who've signed up for ads, but they're small, targetted, anot not cheap. Any large list purporting to be of people who want any kind of advertising e-mail is a fraud.

Spammers also cheat their suppliers. A number of ISPs have admitted that many or most of their spammers never pay for their service. This is especially true with the spammers who use free trial accounts with a provider to send their spew. It's obvious in those cases that they never intended to pay.

Further, as the "Global Communications" 809 phone fraud shows, con-men and thieves are gravitating toward massive spams as a way to perpetrate their crimes. For more information on fraud and scams.

Scamsters are spamming fake contest "entries" also. When one of them was called on it, they subscription-bombed the person who did it. 

Recently, someone forwarded me a spammed offer. They claimed they had a list of high-profile customers, including The New York Times, I forwarded a copy to The Times and received a call early the next morning not only disclaiming a connection to the spammer, but letting me know that they were ordering the spammer to stop using The Times' name in their advertising.