History of Internet "spam"

The earliest documented spam was a message advertising the availability of a new model of Digital Equipment Corporation computers sent to 393 recipients on ARPANET in 1978, by Gary Thuerk.^[15][18][19] The term "spam" for this practice had not yet been applied.

Spamming had been practiced as a prank by participants in multi-user dungeon games, to fill their rivals' accounts with unwanted electronic junk.^[19] The first known electronic chain letter, titled Make Money Fast, was released in 1988.

The first major commercial spam incident started on March 5, 1994, when a husband and wife team of lawyers, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, began using bulk Usenet posting to advertise immigration law services. The incident was commonly termed the "Green Card spam", after the subject line of the postings. Defiant in the face of widespread condemnation, the attorneys claimed their detractors were hypocrites or "zealouts", claimed they had a free speech right to send unwanted commercial messages, and labeled their opponents "anti-commerce radicals." The couple wrote a controversial book entitled How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway.^[19]

Later that year a poster operating under the alias Serdar Argic posted antagonistic messages denying the Armenian Genocide to tens of thousands of Usenet discussions that had been searched for the word Turkey.

Within a few years, the focus of spamming (and anti-spam efforts) moved chiefly to e-mail, where it remains today.^[12] Arguably, the aggressive email spamming by a number of high-profile spammers such as Sanford Wallace of Cyber Promotions in the mid-to-late 1990s contributed to making spam predominantly an email phenomenon in the public mind.

Trademark issues

Hormel Foods Corporation, the maker of SPAM luncheon meat, does not object to the Internet use of the term "spamming". However, they did ask that the capitalized word "SPAM" be reserved to refer to their product and trademark.^[20] By and large, this request is obeyed in forums which discuss spam. In Hormel Foods v SpamArrest, Hormel attempted to assert its trademark rights against SpamArrest, a software company, from using the mark "spam", since Hormel owns the trademark. In a dilution claim, Hormel argued that Spam Arrest's use of the term "spam" had endangered and damaged "substantial goodwill and good reputation" in connection with its trademarked lunch meat and related products. Hormel also asserts that Spam Arrest's name so closely resembles its luncheon meat that the public might become confused, or might think that Hormel endorses Spam Arrest's products. Hormel did not prevail. Attorney Derek Newman responded on behalf of Spam Arrest: "Spam has become ubiquitous throughout the world to describe unsolicited commercial e-mail. No company can claim trademark rights on a generic term." Hormel stated on its website: "Ultimately, we are trying to avoid the day when the consuming public asks, 'Why would Hormel Foods name its product after junk email?'"^[21]

Hormel also made two attempts that were dismissed in 2005 to revoke the mark "SPAMBUSTER".^[22]

Hormel's Corporate Attorney Melanie J. Neumann also sent SpamCop's Julian Haight a letter on August 27, 1999 requesting that he delete an objectionable image (a can of Hormel's SPAM luncheon meat product in a trash can), change references to UCE spam to all lower case letters, and confirm his agreement to do so.^[23]

Costs of spam

The European Union's Internal Market Commission estimated in 2001 that "junk e-mail" cost Internet users €10 billion per year worldwide.^[24]

The California legislature found that spam cost United States organizations alone more than $13 billion in 2007, including lost productivity and the additional equipment, software, and manpower needed to combat the problem.^[25]

Spam's direct effects include the consumption of computer and network resources, and the cost in human time and attention of dismissing unwanted messages. In addition, spam has costs stemming from the kinds of spam messages sent, from the ways spammers send them, and from the arms race between spammers and those who try to stop or control spam. In addition, there are the opportunity cost of those who forgo the use of spam-afflicted systems. There are the direct costs, as well as the indirect costs borne by the victims—both those related to the spamming itself, and to other crimes that usually accompany it, such as financial theft, identity theft, data and intellectual property theft, virus and other malware infection, child pornography, fraud, and deceptive marketing.

The cost to providers of search engines is not insignificant:

The methods of spammers are likewise costly. Because spamming contravenes the vast majority of ISPs' acceptable-use policies, most spammers have for many years gone to some trouble to conceal the origins of their spam. E-mail, Usenet, and instant-message spam are often sent through insecure proxy servers belonging to unwilling third parties. Spammers frequently use false names, addresses, phone numbers, and other contact information to set up "disposable" accounts at various Internet service providers. In some cases, they have used falsified or stolen credit card numbers to pay for these accounts. This allows them to quickly move from one account to the next as each one is discovered and shut down by the host ISPs.

The costs of spam also include the collateral costs of the struggle between spammers and the administrators and users of the media threatened by spamming. ^[26]

Many users are bothered by spam because it impinges upon the amount of time they spend reading their e-mail. Many also find the content of spam frequently offensive, in that pornography is one of the most frequently advertised products. Spammers send their spam largely indiscriminately, so pornographic ads may show up in a work place e-mail inbox—or a child's, the latter of which is illegal in many jurisdictions. Recently, there has been a noticeable increase in spam advertising websites that contain child pornography.^{[citation needed]}

Some spammers argue that most of these costs could potentially be alleviated by having spammers reimburse ISPs and persons for their material.^{[citation needed]} There are three problems with this logic: first, the rate of reimbursement they could credibly budget is not nearly high enough to pay the direct costs^{[citation needed]}, second, the human cost (lost mail, lost time, and lost opportunities) is basically unrecoverable, and third, spammers often use stolen bank accounts and credit cards to finance their operations, and would conceivably do so to pay off any fines imposed.

E-mail spam exemplifies a tragedy of the commons: spammers use resources (both physical and human), without bearing the entire cost of those resources. In fact, spammers commonly do not bear the cost at all. This raises the costs for everyone. In some ways spam is even a potential threat to the entire e-mail system, as operated in the past.

Since e-mail is so cheap to send, a tiny number of spammers can saturate the Internet with junk mail. Although only a tiny percentage of their targets are motivated to purchase their products (or fall victim to their scams), the low cost may provide a sufficient conversion rate to keep the spamming alive. Furthermore, even though spam appears not to be economically viable as a way for a reputable company to do business, it suffices for professional spammers to convince a tiny proportion of gullible advertisers that it is viable for those spammers to stay in business. Finally, new spammers go into business every day, and the low costs allow a single spammer to do a lot of harm before finally realizing that the business is not profitable.

Some companies and groups "rank" spammers; spammers who make the news are sometimes referred to by these rankings.^[27][28] The secretive nature of spamming operations makes it difficult to determine how proliferated an individual spammer is, thus making the spammer hard to track, block or avoid. Also, spammers may target different networks to different extents, depending on how successful they are at attacking the target. Thus considerable resources are employed to actually measure the amount of spam generated by a single person or group. For example, victims that use common anti-spam hardware, software or services provide opportunities for such tracking. Nevertheless, such rankings should be taken with a grain of salt.

General costs of spam

In all cases listed above, including both commercial and non-commercial, "spam happens" because of a positive Cost-benefit analysis result if the cost to recipients is excluded as an externality the spammer can avoid paying.

Cost is the combination of

• Overhead: The costs and overhead of electronic spamming include bandwidth, developing or acquiring an email/wiki/blog spam tool, taking over or acquiring a host/zombie, etc.
• Transaction cost: The incremental cost of contacting each additional recipient once a method of spamming is constructed, multiplied by the number of recipients. (see CAPTCHA as a method of increasing transaction costs)
• Risks: Chance and severity of legal and/or public reactions, including damages and punitive damages
• Damage: Impact on the community and/or communication channels being spammed (see Newsgroup spam)

Benefit is the total expected profit from spam, which may include any combination of the commercial and non-commercial reasons listed above. It is normally linear, based on the incremental benefit of reaching each additional spam recipient, combined with the conversion rate. The conversion rate for botnet-generated spam has recently been measured to be around one in 12,000,000 for pharmaceutical spam and one in 200,000 for infection sites as used by the Storm botnet.^[29]

Spam is prevalent on the Internet because the transaction cost of electronic communications is radically less than any alternate form of communication, far outweighing the current potential losses, as seen by the amount of spam currently in existence. Spam continues to spread to new forms of electronic communication as the gain (number of potential recipients) increases to levels where the cost/benefit becomes positive. Spam has most recently evolved to include wikispam and blogspam as the levels of readership increase to levels where the overhead is no longer the dominating factor. According to the above analysis, spam levels will continue to increase until the cost/benefit analysis is balanced^{[citation needed]}.

In crime

Spam can be used to spread computer viruses, trojan horses or other malicious software. The objective may be identity theft, or worse (e.g., advance fee fraud). Some spam attempts to capitalize on human greed whilst other attempts to use the victims' inexperience with computer technology to trick them (e.g., phishing).

On May 31, 2007, one of the world's most prolific spammers, Robert Alan Soloway, was arrested by U.S. authorities.^[30] Described as one of the top ten spammers in the world, Soloway was charged with 35 criminal counts, including mail fraud, wire fraud, e-mail fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering.^[30] Prosecutors allege that Soloway used millions of "zombie" computers to distribute spam during 2003.^{[citation needed]} This is the first case in which U.S. prosecutors used identity theft laws to prosecute a spammer for taking over someone else's Internet domain name.^{[citation needed]}

Political issues

The neutrality of this section is disputed. Please see the discussion on the talk page. Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved. (December 2007)

Spamming remains a hot discussion topic. In 2004, the seized Porsche of an indicted spammer was advertised on the Internet;^[31] this revealed the extent of the financial rewards available to those who are willing to commit duplicitous acts online. However, some of the possible means used to stop spamming may lead to other side effects, such as increased government control over the Internet, loss of privacy, barriers to free expression, and the commercialization of e-mail.^{[citation needed]}

One of the chief values favored by many long-time Internet users and experts, as well as by many members of the public, is the free exchange of ideas. Many have valued the relative anarchy of the Internet, and bridle at the idea of restrictions placed upon it.^{[citation needed]} A common refrain from spam-fighters is that spamming itself abridges the historical freedom of the Internet, by attempting to force users to carry the costs of material which they would not choose.^{[citation needed]}

An ongoing concern expressed by parties such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU has to do with so-called "stealth blocking", a term for ISPs employing aggressive spam blocking without their users' knowledge. These groups' concern is that ISPs or technicians seeking to reduce spam-related costs may select tools which (either through error or design) also block non-spam e-mail from sites seen as "spam-friendly". SPEWS is a common target of these criticisms. Few object to the existence of these tools; it is their use in filtering the mail of users who are not informed of their use which draws fire.^{[citation needed]}

Some see spam-blocking tools as a threat to free expression—and laws against spamming as an untoward precedent for regulation or taxation of e-mail and the Internet at large. Even though it is possible in some jurisdictions to treat some spam as unlawful merely by applying existing laws against trespass and conversion, some laws specifically targeting spam have been proposed. In 2004, United States passed the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 which provided ISPs with tools to combat spam. This act allowed Yahoo! to successfully sue Eric Head, reportedly one of the biggest spammers in the world, who settled the lawsuit for several thousand U.S. dollars in June 2004. But the law is criticized by many for not being effective enough. Indeed, the law was supported by some spammers and organizations which support spamming, and opposed by many in the anti-spam community. Examples of effective anti-abuse laws that respect free speech rights include those in the U.S. against unsolicited faxes and phone calls, and those in Australia and a few U.S. states against spam.^{[citation needed]}

In November 2004, Lycos Europe released a screen saver called make LOVE not SPAM which made Distributed Denial of Service attacks on the spammers themselves. It met with a large amount of controversy and the initiative ended in December 2004.^{[citation needed]}

While most countries either outlaw or at least ignore spam Bulgaria is the first and until now only one to partially legalize it. According to recent changes in the bulgarian E-Commerce act anyone can send spam to mailboxes, owned by company or organization, as long as there is warning that this may be unsolicited commercial email in the message body. The law contains many other inadequate texts - for example the creation of a nationwide public electronic register of email addresses that do not want to receive spam, something valuable only as source for e-mail address harvesting.

Court cases

United States

Sanford Wallace and Cyber Promotions were the target of a string of lawsuits, many of which were settled out of court, up through the famous 1998 Earthlink settlement^{[citation needed]}which put Cyber Promotions out of business.

Attorney Laurence Canter was disbarred by the Tennessee Supreme Court in 1997 for sending prodigious amounts of spam advertising his immigration law practice.

In 2005, Jason Smathers, a former America Online employee, pled guilty to charges of violating the CAN-SPAM Act. In 2003, he sold a list of approximately 93 million AOL subscriber e-mail addresses to Sean Dunaway who, in turn, sold the list to spammers.^[32][33]

In 2007, Robert Soloway lost a case in a federal court against the operator of a small Oklahoma-based Internet service provider who accused him of spamming. U.S. Judge Ralph G. Thompson granted a motion by plaintiff Robert Braver for a default judgment and permanent injunction against him. The judgment includes a statutory damages award of $10,075,000 under Oklahoma law.^[34]

In June 2007, two men were convicted of eight counts stemming from sending millions of e-mail spam messages that included hardcore pornographic images. Jeffrey A. Kilbride, 41, of Venice, California was sentenced to six years in prison, and James R. Schaffer, 41, of Paradise Valley, Arizona, was sentenced to 63 months. In addition, the two were fined $100,000, ordered to pay $77,500 in restitution to AOL, and ordered to forfeit more than $1.1 million, the amount of illegal proceeds from their spamming operation.^[35] The charges included conspiracy, fraud, money laundering, and transportation of obscene materials. The trial, which began on June 5, was the first to include charges under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, according to a release from the Department of Justice. The specific law that prosecutors used under the CAN-Spam Act was designed to crack down on the transmission of pornography in spam.^[36]

In 2005, Scott J. Filary and Donald E. Townsend of Tampa, Florida were sued by Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist for violating the Florida Electronic Mail Communications Act.^[37] The two spammers were required to pay $50,000 USD to cover the costs of investigation by the state of Florida, and a $1.1 million penalty if spamming were to continue, the $50,000 was not paid, or the financial statements provided were found to be inaccurate. The spamming operation was successfully shut down.^[38]

Edna Fiedler, 44, of Olympia, Washington, on June 25, 2008, pleaded guilty in a Tacoma court and was sentenced to 2 years imprisonment and 5 years of supervised release or probation in an Internet $1 million "Nigerian check scam." She conspired to commit bank, wire and mail fraud, against US citizens, specifically using Internet by having had an accomplice who shipped counterfeit checks and money orders to her from Lagos, Nigeria, last November. Fiedler shipped out $ 609,000 fake check and money orders when arrested and prepared to send additional $ 1.1 million counterfeit materials. Also, the U.S. Postal Service recently intercepted counterfeit checks, lottery tickets and eBay overpayment schemes with a face value of $2.1 billion.^[39][40]

United Kingdom

In the first successful case of its kind, Nigel Roberts from the Channel Islands won £270 against Media Logistics UK who sent junk e-mails to his personal account.^[41]

January 2007, a Sheriff Court in Scotland awarded Mr. Gordon Dick £750 (the then maximum sum which could be awarded in a Small Claim action) plus expenses of £618.66, a total of £1368.66 against Transcom Internet Services Ltd.^[42] for breaching anti-spam laws.^[43] Transcom had been legally represented at earlier hearings but were not represented at the proof, so Dick got his decree by default. It is the largest amount awarded in compensation in the United Kingdom since the Nigel Roberts case in 2005 above.

New Zealand

In October 2008, a vast international internet spam operation run from New Zealand was cited by American authorities as one of the world’s largest, and for a time responsible for up to a third of all unwanted emails.

In a statement the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) named Christchurch’s Lance Atkinson as one of the principals of the operation.

New Zealand’s Internal Affairs announced it had lodged a $200,000 claim in the High Court against Atkinson and his brother Shane Atkinson and courier Roland Smits, after raids in Christchurch.

This marked the first prosecution since the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act (UEMA) was passed in September 2007. The FTC said it had received more than three million complaints about spam messages connected to this operation, and estimated that it may be responsible for sending billions of illegal spam messages.

The US District Court froze the defendants’ assets to preserve them for consumer redress pending trial.^[44]

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