FTC: “Spam Harvest” Results Reap Help for Consumers Trying To Avoid Spam. Some good prosecutions (yay!):
The FTC alleged that NetSource One and James R. Haddaway, operating as WorldRemove, used spam and the Internet to sell a service they claimed would reduce or eliminate spam from consumers’ e-mail. The claims were false. In fact, using an undercover account to test the claims, the FTC found it received more spam after signing up for the service. The agency charged the defendants with violations of the FTC Act.
Plus some good official studies to back up our own, unscientific research:
In an effort to determine what online activities place consumers at risk for receiving spam, Northeast Netforce investigators seeded 175 different locations on the Internet with 250 new, undercover e-mail addresses and monitored the addresses for six weeks. The sites included chat rooms, newsgroups, Web pages, free personal Web-page services, message boards and e-mail service directories. One hundred percent of the e-mail addresses posted in chat rooms received spam; the first received spam only eight minutes after the address was posted. Eighty-six percent of the e-mail addresses posted at newsgroups and Web pages received spam; as did 50 percent of addresses at free personal Web page services; 27 percent from message board postings; and nine percent of e-mail service directories.
Plus, the lie of “targeting”:
Spam Harvest partners also found that the type of spam received was not related to the sites where the e-mail addresses were posted. For example, e-mail addresses posted to children’s newsgroups received a large amount of adult content and work-at-home spam.