A sting operation has revealed a possible way to really hurt the networks, factories and biggies of pirated software and spam. Purchases were made, and the money was tracked:
“One bank alone was used to settle more than 60 percent of all transactions, and the top three banks—Azerigazbank in Azerbaijan, St Kitts & Nevis Anguilla National Bank in St Kitts &Nevis, and Danish-owned DnB Nord in Latvia—together accounted for more than 95 percent of all money paid to spam vendors. The implication is that many banks simply won't deal with spam outfits. Even when switching does occur, it's disruptive, with payment processors typically introducing delays of days or weeks for due diligence to be performed. The Latvian bank's Danish owners say that the spam customers were inherited when they bought the bank, and claim that they have terminated their relationship with the spam affiliate programs.” – arstechnica
Well, if the money was tracked to your bank, then I guess you haven’t done a good job, have you?
Combined with legislation, like the variety used to regulate online gambling and the kind designed to kill the botnets (good for computer security) might make a truly large dent in this illicit market whose profits go to support drugs (and therefore, indirectly terrorism), counterfeit software, and knock-off merchandise. The problem with going after only the botnets is that it yields short term results. Others spring up to handle the “customers”.
I say the economists are right in this. Go after the banks: Setting up payment systems is a lot harder than botnets, and really hurts their bottom line. That plus the the other two lines of attack should begin to show real results.
All that has to be done is to forbid certain types of credit card transactions, really. As for the penalties? They can be made more onerous than the profits (which is what it’s about for legitimate banks).
I strongly recommend reading the article in arstechnica.
Source:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/05/a-way-to-take-out-spammers-3-banks-process-95-of-spam-transactions.ars