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Why are there no sites to shame and punish companies that spammers promote?

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TaoPhoenix:
There's something more complicated going on here. After a 12 second nod to "first world problems", let's poke at this.

1. I believe the posts are coming from second/third world countries. Last I looked into that kind of thing, 1000 spam posts might only cost $50. Could be less. So the money is "trivial".

2. What if the company doesn't care? The problem with a wall of shame is believing that the company cares. But if they have some kind of model that revolves around flash mob type sales, who cares if they get on some wall? Have y'all *looked* at the companies involved? They point to some domain like "Prada-Handbags-4-cheap-for-all.com" or whatever. Like any savvy consumer would buy there! Not!

3. Meta-Models
Then it gets even wilder. What if they don't actually plan to sell much of anything at all!? Let's suppose they have 10 of each item just to cover emergencies. Maybe someone would click the link and go look. What then if they were an *AD company*? Then the viewer looks, doesn't buy, but they get served an ad impression, so "They Win".

Those are just starter points. I know, it's old hat to say "It's ___ year", but it is. Basically like we all knew, the rise of the internet is the single most disruptive tech change for the past 40-50-60 years. Life REALLY did used to be simple in the 70's. I'll stop here just to get the thread moving.

mouser:
I think your item #1 is almost certainly correct.

Your item #2 is not though. Of course they wont care if they "get on a wall" -- but if that wall was used by google to remove them (or even just decrease in web search), or have their emails marked as spam, it would devestate their business overnight.  that's my whole point -- this entire industry of behavior could be eliminated in short order if the folks who are ALREADY defacto choosing winners and losers and badguys and goodguys decided to take some action against these spammers.

The email blacklisting services are absolutely deadly and cavalier much of the time -- marking innocent people as spammers based on some very shoddy criteria.. all they have to do is coordinate with the people who track forum spammers and they could actually do some good in this world.

Point 3 im not really following -- i think your saying that listing them on some public wall of shame might get them desired attention.  I think that could be solved in a variety of ways -- but the key thing to understand is that the PUBLIC shaming wall is not the important feature of this idea.  The important feature is to have a kind of central clearing house for trusted information about companies who are directly or indirectly paying for spammers to pollute forums and blogs in order to advertise their products, and have the self-appointed traffic cops on the internet simply adjust their (already set up and daily used) lists to penalize them.

TaoPhoenix:
I think your item #1 is almost certainly correct.

Your item #2 is not though. Of course they wont care if they "get on a wall" -- but if that wall was used by google to remove them (or even just decrease in web search), or have their emails marked as spam, it would devestate their business overnight.  that's my whole point -- this entire industry of behavior could be eliminated in short order if the folks who are ALREADY defacto choosing winners and losers and badguys and goodguys decided to take some action against these spammers.
-mouser (April 13, 2013, 07:47 PM)
--- End quote ---

Naw, you're just a nice Mouser who isn't thinking in the gutter enough.

Theory:
Those kinds of links themselves are just "redirects" and pointers and other things so they don't plan to be searched, they plan to be "live clicked" by the site userbase. I am postulating that these companies aren't run by idiots, they have been doing this for over five years (!!) so they have some kind of shuffle-aggregator-splitter plan going.

TaoPhoenix:
Point 3 im not really following -- i think your saying that listing them on some public wall of shame might get them desired attention.  
-mouser (April 13, 2013, 07:47 PM)
--- End quote ---

This is the *Semi-Reverse* of what I am saying. I believe that they *don't care* if they get on a wall, because the wall would likely only capture some throwaway element. If they have a hyper-fast revolver-system, their throwaways are good for a week max, so who cares if they get on a wall. The trick they could bank on to counter your wall of shame idea is very few people could/would track down DEEP links such as "prada-handbags-now" is run on ip 26.352.18.287 (I made that up), which *also owns* "leather-handbags-you-know-you-want-them", which THEN links to "GBI" (Global Brands Inc, purposely nothing sounding name), which is then a shell for 12 sister companies, each of which uses a different payment processor ...

etc.

Tinman57:
  I remember when spam started becoming a problem way back when.  There were companies that hired marketing companies to place ads for them.  Little did they know that these marketing companies were spamming their ads, a few of them put apology letters on their website stating that they did not approve of their marketing company spamming.

  The BEST thing to do when you receive spam is to report it so it will be shut down.  Of course the spammers have to constantly move around once they're identified and shut down, but if you do nothing they're free to keep spamming from their site.
  You can report it to your ISP, usually something like "abuse@your ISP.com".  Then you can also report it by sending the entire email, including headers to "[email protected]".  There are others as well, but for the best spam reporting "How To" site with all kinds of information and apps, go to http://spam.abuse.net/userhelp/#report .

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