Friday fun: Electronic mail fraud and more


There's a term you don't hear every day: electronic mail fraud. Apparently it's just one of a litany of charges brought against four employees of a company called Adconion. Per Brian Krebs: "The government alleged that between December 2010 and September 2014, the defendants engaged in a conspiracy to identify or pay to identify blocks of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that were registered to others but which were otherwise inactive."

What we have here are (alleged) bad guys (allegedly) engaging in fraud to obtain big chunks of IP addresses which were then (allegedly) used to send (alleged) spam. Yuck.

Bad guys ruin everything for the rest of us. One of the big reasons ISPs and MBPs are suspicious about mail from IP addresses with no significant mail history is probably because of garbage like this. Using large swaths of IP address space (more than 65,000 IP addresses) and attempting to evade spam filters, sigh.

You'll note a guilty plea regarding CAN-SPAM violations, too. CAN-SPAM prosecutions are (too) rare, but they do happen.

Read all about it: Adconion Execs Plead Guilty in Federal Anti-Spam Case (Brian Krebs)

Post a Comment

Comments