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Unsolicited Email Threatens to Overwhelm the Internet

90 per cent of spam is sent by fewer than 200 people

LIFESITE, June 17, 2003 (LifeSiteNews.com) - If you are receiving increasing amounts of pornographic, low grade or just plain annoying commercial email you are definitely not alone.

A special report in the July/August issue of technologyreview.com (TR) relates that "more than 13 billion unwanted email messages (called spam) swamp the Internet per day, worldwide". This giant wave of junk is estimated to cause a $10 billion loss of productivity in the U.S. alone. Technology Review ominously observes that the amount of daily spam is doubling roughly every 18 months and could soon represent 90 percent of all email.

Currently, many industry leaders are intensely developing strategies to try to stop this crippling of the Internet. Millions and eventually billions will be spent by companies and individual users for new solutions.

The puzzling thing is that 90 per cent of the mess is being caused by what The Coalition Against Unsolicited Email (CAUSE), and others agree are fewer than 200 people.

Jon Praed, with the Internet Law group in Arlington, VA says spammers have a common profile. "They have not been successful in anything else…They are hackers gone bad, or they are crooks gone geek."

57-year-old Alan Ralsky of Detroit, for instance, is considered one of the top five spammers in the world. He regularly sends out vast amounts of junk email using his list of 250 million email addresses. Ralsky, has a "past littered with fraud convictions, a court-ordered fine, personal bankruptcy and a brief jail stint". Ralsky is somehow still able to send out billions of often offensive emails and cause hundreds of millions of dollars of cost to others, without legal penalties sufficient enough to shut him down. Something doesn't add up here.

John Mozena of CAUSE believes that the spam plague is a criminal justice matter and that legislatures and the courts have got to get involved. But, for criminal charges to work, the Internet has got to change to so that every email can be traced to its source, as is the case now with harassing telephone calls.

LifeSite agrees with John Mozena. These 200 or so spammers are getting away with massive damage only because they are being allowed to. It is known who they are while no one has yet done anything affective against them.

Meanwhile, Focus on the Family has published an article on how to respond to Porn spam. In an April 30 article, "Cleaning up the Inbox: Fight prom spam without exposing yourself to harmful material" Focus give some useful tips on capturing spam source addresses and the benefit of forwarding them to obscenitycrimes.org.

See the Technology review article at:
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/schwartz0703.asp

See the Focus on the Family article at
http://family.org/cforum/fosi/pornography/caape/a0025379.cfm
and a more extensive one at
http://www.family.org/cforum/fosi/pornography/caape/a0025858.cfm

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