When spam eludes software, bring in the detectives

[NeonWizard]

Sterling McBride spends a lot of time waiting for spammers to make a mistake. They usually do.

When he hunted down escaped prisoners for the United States Marshals Service, McBride learned the value of lying low until fugitives trip up, leaving small clues on their whereabouts. Now, as an investigator for Microsoft, McBride watches carefully for tidbits of data that link some of the 2 billion pieces of junk e-mail that Microsoft's Hotmail service receives each day with the people who send them.

Once he finds an electronic key to the spammer's identity--a real name, address or phone number--McBride uses all the tools of a regular detective: trailing suspects, subpoenaing their bank records and looking for disgruntled former associates to become informers. But first he must lift the cloak of anonymity provided by the Internet.

"The guys who do this are pretty tenacious," McBride said. "There are networks that are very well organized. But we have really started to figure out how they operate."

Read Article

[andsome]

About time someone did something about the problem

[andsome]

WELCOME to the forum by the way.

[-pops-]

Once again the Americans think they are the centre of the Universe and that they can control all the spam.

Well, for Sterling McBride's information, most of the spam that gets trapped here emanates from Korea, Japan, France and br - wherever that is. I'm sure they don't care a tiddley bot what the Americans or McBride is doing and the French would, most likely, be relishing it.

What is needed is an electronic method of stopping spam entering the internet system. Once this is in place the spammers worldwide would just give up. Will it happen? Doubt it :(