[SpamCop-List] Re: Spam from China

[Philippe Verdy (n.o-s.p.a.m+abuse)]

"Patto" <nobody at devnull.spamcop.net> a écrit dans le message de news: 
dniovt$d6c$1 at news.spamcop.net...
> I am having trouble with the word 'from' in your subject line. Although a 
> lot of spam comes from servers located in China, almost 100% of my spam 
> "from" China originates from spammers in the U.S.  I get about 1 spam 
> message a month that is in Chinese, and about 2 in Russian. The rest is in 
> English, advertising "services" that is often restricted to US citizens 
> only, and originate from well-known spammers in Florida and elsewhere in 
> the US.  Not to mention that they often exploit servers in China and the 
> rest of the world without knowledge and/or permission of the owners.
>
> But of course it's always easy to blame the Chinese, and Asians in 
> general, and their corrupt governments.

I fully agree with this. In fact the few emails written in Chinese I receive 
sometime do not come from Chinese spamvertizers (in PRC) but from Taiwan or 
Singapore.

China is wellknown to have setup a very intrusive filtering system that can 
really track the activities of its citizens and of small businesses that 
still refuse to pay the price of corruption.

Now the bigget problem in China comes with its regionalized structure of its 
very large ISPs (china net com for example), which are locally corruptible 
by large businesses installed in Hong Kong, Beijing and Shangai, and that 
provide and sell expensive bullet proof hosting to US spammers. There's 
evidence that these bulletproof hosting services are getting lots of 
precious dollars which is then used to corrupt and compromize local filters 
and security enforcement teams.

China seems to be blind to such activity because it does not harm its own 
business and does not violate the antidemocratic control of its citizens, 
and because it collects taxes and profits a lot to its external commercial 
balance.

But if you look further, you'llsee that China is not the only one in cause: 
large US bandwidth providers installed in China are complice of this 
activity because they sell their bandwidth to Chinese bulletproof service 
providers, and because they want to profit from other businesses in China 
with its explosive economic growth. Here I see what MCI/UUNET, Level3 and 
Sprint are doing in China: they are blind to the problem, because they do 
not host themselves the spamming services but do provide a general 
connectivity that allows them to sell telecommunication services, or to 
transport computing activites made at low price in China.

Lots of US companies (including IBM, Apple, Dell, Gateway, Acer, 
Microsoft...) are complice of this, each time they are delocating their 
computing activities in China: they want low cost jobs, and low cost 
connections, so they permit that US telcos provide general connectivity with 
China and don't want filters.

Clearly China is bad, and India still doesnot have the same level of 
problems, depsite it has a now large computing business and large phone and 
Internet market, with lots of quality programmers. The difference is that 
India is a democracy, which is much easier to control by its own public 
without being threatened by its police. Less corruption in India means more 
respectuous behavior.

Brasil is approximately in the same situation as India but its still recent 
economic crisis and its long history with narco-trafficants and organized 
crime has left a high level of corruption. This country is still very 
dangerous for its citizensbecause the law isnot applied the way it should 
be. Large cities inBrasilare still among the most dangerous ones in the 
world (with rapts and lots of murders against businessmen if they don't pay 
enough for their own physical security). So it's not surprizing that Brasil 
gets the same high level of spam coming from hosts located there.

But I don't want to accuse more China and Brasil. It's a fact that spam is 
operated by large gangs with lot of money, and enough money to corrupt lots 
of people, but also to pay hackers around the world so that they will write 
for them the firearms that they will be able to use worldwide.

Today's most important problem is the money of spamgangs, and the lack of 
application of existing laws in the most developed countries (where these 
gangs are operating to corrupt the rest of the world). It should be time to 
consider these gangs for what they are: Gangsters!

Today, even the most criminal gangsters and trafficants are organizing their 
spam activities on the Net because it is FAR LESS dangerous and MUCH MORE 
profitable than legacy traffics (the price of illegal drugs is now 
constantly dropping, they can't find the economic growth they need in their 
"business", so they invest nowa lot in more profitable activities): they 
create and finance affiliate programs, finance spywares and spamwares, and 
even sell their illegal service to existing legal businesses that are 
already exposed to growth problems in markets with lots of competitors. They 
steal revenue from affiliation programs, illegally sell drugs on the 
Internet (if they only deliver something to their abused customers!), 
constantly make bank robberies (by stealing credit card numbers).