Spam Wars Enter Another Round

FTC severs one e-mail chain, mounts ongoing campaign against illegal online solicitation.

Saumya Roy, Medill News Service

WASHINGTON, D.C.--The Federal Trade Commission has launched a campaign against spam, upon nearly extinguishing an e-mail scam it was investigating for more than a year.

The FTC has also settled charges against seven people who collected money using the shuttered chain e-mail system. The defendants' chain e-mail asked people to send $5 to the top five people on the list. In return, it promised "$46,000 or more in the next 90 days," and other large sums to participants.

"This chain letter deceptively claims the program is legal and urges recruits who question its legitimacy to contact the FTC's associate director for marketing practices. Well, I am the associate director for marketing practices, and these chain letters are illegal," Eileen Harrington said at the FTC announcement Tuesday.

Widespread Abuse

More than 2000 people in 60 countries participated in this particular spam scam, FTC officials say. The agency has been battling spam for some time. Since September 2000, the FTC has sent 3000 e-mail warnings about illicit online ventures.

When the FTC uncovered the scam in September 2000, it contacted the 1000 participants with a warning to stop participating in the illegal money-making chain. Six months later, the FTC found 2000 more participants involved in the chain e-mail, says Jennifer Mandigo, staff attorney at the FTC.

Mandigo said FTC investigators joined the chain under cover, sending payment to participants who responded, confirming their guilt. Seven of these repeat offenders were taken to court. Chain letters involving money or other prizes violate federal law even if they contain contrary statements, and that people who join in such mail ventures never get money.

The FTC is still in the process of mailing 2000 people who are keeping the chain alive, underscoring the problem of rooting out spam.

"We're going after deceptive spam and the people who send it," said Timothy Muris, chairman of the FTC. "We want it off the Net."

The spam battle will be waged through an awareness campaign, officials say. The FTC is distributing educational material in partnership with Internet service providers associations around the country.

Deeper Problems

However, the FTC plan has been met with some skepticism.

"If they are going to limit their enforcement activities to get-rich-quick schemes, then the systemic problems aren't going to be addressed," said Ray Everett-Church, counsel for the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail in San Jose.

Everett-Church said he has yet to see the FTC pursue cases that "require a little more depth of investigation and greater resources and little less of a slam dunk." That could mean, for instance, taking action against people and companies that sell the software used to create forged headers that can hijack e-mail servers, he said.

Without aggressive action, analysts doubt that increased enforcement will have much impact on the rapidly rising volumes of spam.

Brightmail, a San Francisco firm that employs both technological and hands-on monitoring techniques for fighting spam, said that in 2000 the number of spam attacks for a one-month period was about 300,000. By the end of last year, it had increased to 2 million a month, and last month it jumped to 2.8 million. A spam attack can range from a few hundred to many thousands of e-mails.

Francois Lavaste, a vice president at Brightmail, suspects that the most recent rise in spam traffic may be due to the September 11 attacks in the United States, which saw a rise in volume in general e-mail traffic. Spammers, he said, are acting in similar fashion.

"It's a great time to use that medium that people are using," said Lavaste.

Currently, 18 states have some form of antispam law on the books. For example, California requires labeling such correspondence as ADV or ADV:ADLT on the subject line to indicate an e-mail contains advertising or adult advertising. Most state laws make it illegal to use false header or routing information. Many states also allow an Internet service provider to sue a spammer who violates its e-mail polices. A few, such as Iowa, require instructions on how to opt out of receiving e-mail from the sender in the future.

Patrick Thibodeau of Computerworld Online contributed to this report.