The hidden spammers

This is not exactly a new story, but it’s a little scary anyway. MSNBC did a research on who profits from spam and found out a few very interesting facts. The answer to the question is, quite a lot of people, including companies you’d never suspect.

This makes it hard to fight spam by boycotting businesses that spam. I will not knowingly do business with someone who spams me, unless I have no other choice. However, as that article shows, for many messages, it’s hard to see whom, exactly, you should boycott. Should you boycott just the one spammer who sent the message ? If so, how do you know who is he ? And, more importantly, would you be doing business with him in the first place ?

Or should you boycott whomever would profit if you responded to the spam ? That might be way too broad. Let’s see a few examples: one message I got said “Win a 2002 Corvette!”; the contest seems to be run by surveynetworks.com. I don’t think I should boycott Corvettes and, in fact, I’d very much appreciate getting a brand new one. surveynetworks.com, on the other hand, doesn’t rank too well with me.

Maybe that one was a little too far-fetched; let’s see another one, one I am sure most of you are familiar with. Let’s take any of the spams advertising Viagra. Now, assuming that they are really delivering something to buyers, and that what they deliver is, in fact, Viagra (a long shot, I know), then presumably Pfizer would make money if I bought something from the spammer. Should I boycott them ? I don’t think so. Not that I need them, of course.

And, anyway, how do you even figure out who will profit ? The MSNBC reporters were very surprised when they answered a mortgage ad, and I guess the same scheme applies to a lot of other types of spam.

Are we really losing the fight ?