Australia's Herald Sun is catching on to the obvious

The Herald Sun in Australia notes that criminals are involved with spam. This less than shocking revelation is now helped by the fact that many countries are adding laws against spamming - but what they referring to is that spam is no longer just porn and the equivalent of the door-to-door salesman.

From the article:

In its early days spam was dominated by the pornographic industry and entrepreneurial salesmen who recognised its potential as a cheap and unregulated marketing medium.

"Since then organised crime gangs have been moving operations online with spam providing a virtually invisible channel for this kind of activity.

"By using spam to direct e-mail users on to disreputable web sites, criminals can conceal activity from authorities."

These sites can provide criminals with the perfect vehicle to offload fake pharmaceuticals and counterfeit software."

The article also mentions the trend in phishing - where the spammer is trying to convince you that they are some other entity (your bank for instance) and then get you to hand over information that will allow them to steal from you (passwords, account numbers, etc).

I should point out that when it says that spam was initially porn and then moved on - it should be noted that any new computer tech is going to see this. 1-800/900 numbers, virtual reality, CD-ROMs, and DVDs immediately come to mind.
When the CD-ROM first came out they were widely adopted by the porn industry as a new way to deliver content. It eventually spread out to mainstream content as well and in the midst of that there were people using it to sell illegal software.
Amusingly enough they are now using spam to promote those same CD-ROMs.

I think it is a pretty standard evolution process these days that as things are picked up, prior to going mainstream the people that are going to make use of it first are the outliers - which include the sketchier area of commerce including crime, porn, and gambling.

By that logic, Las Vegas is always the cutting edge of the future (there are many authors that have made similar points in the past).

Posted by Eric at July 16, 2004 09:16 AM | TrackBack