Re: spam is complicated, Worsening google service reputation and abuse

[John Levine via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>]

It appears that Barry Shein via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org> said:
> There's too much anecdote in these discussions.
>
> For example are there ~20 spam operations which account for 90+% of
> the spam? What sort of products do the major spammers spam?
>
> Wild guess, but I suspect it's something like that, a small set of
> spammers accounting for most of it and then a rapidly descending long
> tail.

I go to conferences where we talk about questions like this. There is a
complicated crime economy where different groups specialize in different things,
of which sending the spam is only one bit. Believe it or not there is a lot of
law enforcement action, they take these groups down all the time, but there are
many of them, and they are often in countries where the government doesn't care.
As an egregious example, the romance scams are mostly along the Cambodia-Burma
border with people from other countries lured by promises of fake tech jobs who
then can't leave.

I think it is safe to say there are a lot more than 20 groups, and they're not
the same groups from one year to the next.

Adding to the excitement, you can send spam in lots of different ways. There was
a Chinese group that specialized in iMessage and RCS spam of "you have an unpaid
turnpike toll" or "you have a postage due package", directing you to very
plausible fake websites where they steal your credit card info. They got busted
due to poor opsec but they seem to have regrouped elsewhere in China.

R's,
John
_______________________________________________
NANOG mailing list 
https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/nanog () lists nanog org/message/BCAJVJFWYURESDJN7YTLEOQLRALE5FB3/