Credit Card | Study: Credit Cards Could Help Choke Off Spam Emails ...

How many spam emails does it take to sell $100 worth of Viagra? About 12.5 million. No wonder that the spam filter in your email is chock-full of those annoying ?Cheap Buy Now? messages.

But a group of computer scientists headed by Kirill Levchenko and Andreas Pitsillidis at the University of California San Diego think they?ve found a way to put an end to spam for good. How? Block spammers? ability to take credit card payments.

Spam constitutes an astonishing 90 percent of all email traffic. However, according to the University of California San Diego study published this month, the number of individuals responsible for the emails is comparatively tiny. Behind the staggering volume of spam emails, say researchers, is a surprisingly small number of spammers who work through the credit card merchant accounts of an even smaller number of banks.

For the study, researchers reviewed nearly a billion spam messages and used prepaid Visa cards to make around 120 purchases from spam-producing merchants. The goal was to track the trajectory of the average spam email and find out where spam emails come from, where the spammers direct purchasers and what happens after someone makes a purchase.

Researchers say that it soon became clear that despite thousands of spam domain names and hundreds of fake companies selling oft-hawked products like Viagra, herbal remedies and pirated software, there are only about a dozen or so organizations running the online stores.

Even more significantly, those organizations use only 13 banks to manage the credit card transactions involved in the purchases. In fact, 95 percent of the spam transactions were processed by only three banks: one based in Azerbaijan, one based in the West Indies and one that was a subsidiary of a Danish bank. In addition, researchers found that almost every spam sale is processed by major credit card companies like Visa and MasterCard.

The trouble with fighting spam ? and a possible solution
Traditionally, fighting spam involves developing software to block it, which has turned into a multibillion dollar industry in itself. But spam blockers have serious limitations.

?Spam continues to be a major problem,? says Steve Kirsch, chief executive of Abaca Technology, an antispam company in San Jose, CA. ?There is no such thing as a perfect spam filter and there likely never will be. If you turn up the filter settings, you just end up with more false positives.? For example, ? emails end up in your spam filter that should not go there.?

But the study?s findings led the researchers to suggest that fighting spam could be as simple as cutting off spammers? access to banking ? thus taking away their financial incentive. The best way to limit spammers? revenue? Cut off credit card access.

Researchers hypothesize that if the U.S. banks that provide credit cards to U.S. consumers were to refuse to settle certain transactions with banks that support spam-advertised goods, spammers? businesses would effectively be demonetized.

But is it really possible to shut the spammers down? The researchers think so. Since the spam system relies on such a small number of banks and credit card processers, it?s especially vulnerable to disruption.

It would be easy, say researchers, to provide credit card companies with lists of known spammers or known spam back ends that would enable credit card companies, such as Visa , MasterCard and American Express , to effectively stop credit card transactions to those merchants.

The researchers also suggest that the financial blacklist could be

But would banks go along with it? Spam is a money-maker for banks, and they?ve historically not taken kindly to outside interference in how they run their business.

Furthermore, some industry experts argue that Visa and MasterCard, rather than banks, hold the key to effectively undercut spam emails.

?If you just focus on card issuers, you?d have to get all the banks in the U.S. to participate for it to be effective,? says Kirsch. ?However, if Visa or MasterCard were to make it a violation of the merchant agreement to send out unsolicited spam email, it would be a game changer.?

Ultimately, choking off spammers? access to credit card processing may end up being a policy question for U.S. lawmakers to decide. The researchers point out that for a subset of spam-advertised goods, such as regulated pharmaceuticals, brand replica products and pirated software, there is a legal basis for instituting such policies.

Indeed, despite the political challenges such an intervention would involve, there is a precedent. Five years ago, Congress ordered credit card companies (mainly Visa and MasterCard) to restrict payment processing for certain kinds of online gambling transactions ? which effectively curtailed the industry.

However, don?t expect credit card companies or lawmakers to take action anytime soon. In the meantime, consumers will have to hope that spam blockers will make headway keeping up with increasingly aggressive, and effective, spammers.

Source: http://rssnews.tv/722/credit-card-study-credit-cards-could-help-choke-off-spam-emails.html

invincible funny or die fahrenheit anderson oskar schindler how yellow