Re: Forbes: Pay up

On July 3, 2003 at 00:46 [email protected] (Roy S. Walker) wrote:
 > "Charge the sender" was discussed yesterday at the famous 'spam summit' at the house of commons in 
 > the UK.  View seems to be: this will further encourage the practice of spammers to gain control of 
 > legitimate email servers, with the intention of sending out spam from an 'authorised' sender (the 
 > recent piece on the BBC re British Airways as a source of spam refers..). This idea will NOT work 
 > in practice.  Naive innocents would pick up the charge.


I don't agree with that.

There are many instances in life where some unscrupulous person could
cause charges to unfairly be attributed to you.

Somehow, we cope, such as cancellable credit card transactions etc.

What it does is raise the bar on:

a) Securing one's system lest they be put in a situation of having to
get charges removed.

b) Providing an economic base (actual revenue and loss of revenue to
fraud) to pursue spammers with.

Imagine if credit cards were simply these (nearly) free services
which, say, only simplified the process of a merchant billing a
customer, perhaps a swipe just provides standardized information to
the merchant's POS system to generate a bill, mailing info etc.

How could the credit card companies possibly pursue fraud?

But, add that 2-4% in merchant charges and the billions in income lost
to the banks over fraudulent charges etc and suddenly there is both
the will and the way to pursue fraud vigorously.

Doesn't eliminate fraud entirely, but we certainly don't feel any need
to volunteer our time on IETF mailing lists to kick around ideas on
how to curb credit card fraud!

Why? Because there's big bux in pursuing credit card fraud.

Just about none in pursuing spam.

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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