Seven years ago, Bill Gates told the world that spam would be gone in two years; what we got instead was growth in the mutli-billion dollar industry trying to stop it.Yet researchers at the University of California think they may have found the Achilles heel of spam: the companies that process their credit card transactions. "In the end, spam is an advertising business," Dr. Stefan Savage told the Times. "However, it only makes sense if you can find a way to take people's money. This means credit cards. Credit cards are the only payment platform that is ubiquitously available to Western consumers and can be used for Internet commerce."They tracked down three culprit banks responsible for much of the spam-based transactions: Azerigazbank in Azerbaijan, St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla National Bank in St. Kitts and Nevis, and the Latvian branch of the Danish DnB NORD. To do it, they got spammed – hard. The researchers spent months collecting as much spam as they could, waited for the emails advertising Viagra and other herbal remedies to roll in, and, with thousands of dollars at their disposal, started buying. They looked at nearly a billion messages and made 120 purchases, none for more than $277. (pdf)
There’s just one problem here: now that the banks’ cover is blown, the spam companies can simply start looking for other banks. And yet maybe that’s not a problem after all: researchers say that because the spam network relies on only a few banks and an even smaller number of credit card processors, their business is highly vulnerable to blacklisted banks. Meanwhile, finally, after years of accepting advertising from online pharmacies, the biggest ad server, Google, is changing course (and paying $500 million in fines).The real challenge will be getting the banks to cut the spammers off: that’s a thorny issue, but not an unprecedented one: five years ago, the federal government ordered the credit card companies to stop processing payments for online betting sites. That’s why they moved overseas. The United States government could blacklist these banks – a death knell in the financial industry – or compel Visa and American Express to repeat what they did last time.Spam may be in trouble – at least until those clever bastards find a workaround. Still, there’s no word on what the researchers did with all those pills
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