The Anonymous Widower

An Alternative Approach To Stopping Spam

This article based on research done by three eminent Universities; University of California-San Diego, the University of California-Berkeley, and the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, shows that the best way to stop spam might be to go for the banks who process the money for the spammers.

It would appear that just a few banks are involved. Here’s what the article says.

However, when it comes to banking, the bottlenecks are far more severe, and switching is far more difficult. One bank alone was used to settle more than 60 percent of all transactions, and the top three banks—Azerigazbank in Azerbaijan, St Kitts & Nevis Anguilla National Bank in St Kitts &Nevis, and Danish-owned DnB Nord in Latvia—together accounted for more than 95 percent of all money paid to spam vendors. The implication is that many banks simply won’t deal with spam outfits. Even when switching does occur, it’s disruptive, with payment processors typically introducing delays of days or weeks for due diligence to be performed.

Surely, no honest person would trust these banks with their money.

So we shouldn’t give up on our spam filters, but constantly chase the routes that the money takes to get to the criminals. After all the researchers used just 100 purchases to obtain their findings.  So shouldn’t Western and other governments pool some researchers and money to find more rogue banks and then eliminate them from payments systems worldwide.

June 1, 2011 - Posted by AnonW | Computing | Banks, Fraud, Internet, Spam