Man May Have Sent 2 Billion Spam E-Mails

[matcom]

<snip>

SYDNEY, Australia --An Australian man under investigation for illegal spamming sent more than 2 billion e-mails promoting Viagra in a year, an official said Wednesday.

Experts say that's a drop in the ocean compared to the number of spam e-mails sent globally each year, and the system he used probably wasn't very sophisticated.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority began investigating the man, whose identity was not immediately released, after receiving a tip-off from authorities in the Netherlands in May last year.

Danyel Molenaar, a project manager for the Dutch Independent Regulator of Post and Telecommunications, said the man had rented 35 servers for around 14,000 Australian dollars (US$10,493; euro8,256) each per month from a small Internet service provider in the Netherlands to carry out the alleged spam campaign.

"These 35 servers were used just for sending spam day-in, day-out for at least a year, probably longer," Molenaar said Wednesday. "This operation probably sent out billions and billions of e-mails."

Australia has some of the toughest laws in the world against spamming, the notoriously hard-to-stop practice of flooding as many inboxes as possible with unwanted sales messages in the hope some of the receivers will reply.

Under Australia's Spam Act of 2003, it is illegal for Australian residents to be involved in the sending of unsolicited commercial e-mails, even if they are generated from outside the country.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/09/13/man_may_have_sent_2_billion_spam_e_mails?mode=PF

[billyskank]

1. He RENTED servers for sending spam??

What a fucking moran! :o

Any spammer worth his salt nowadays uses a worm or trojan to hijack other people's computers, and use them to send the spam. Before that they used to use open SMTP relays in the far east.