Spam Financiers
After examining millions of spam e-mails and spam Web sites—and making over 100 purchases from the sites advertised by the spammers—the research team found that just three banks were used to clear more than 95 percent of spam funds.
The banks:
Azerigazbank in Azerbaijan, St Kitts & Nevis Anguilla National Bank in St Kitts &Nevis, and Norwegian-owned DnB Nord in Latvia
Probably better off leaving this alone. Not sure you want to incentivize the decentralization of spam/gambling/deviant global financing (a la terrorism).
But where those efforts have had only short-term success, work against the banking bottleneck may well prove more fruitful. If dealing with the handful of banks were made impossible—for example, if Western banks refused to settle certain kinds of credit card transactions with banks known to be spam-friendly, an approachalready used in the US to block access to online gambling sites—it would severely diminish the ability for the spam vendors to get paid, sucking the cash out of the spam business. And given the time and complexity of setting up new merchant agreements, this might be one area where the good guys can move faster than the spammers. Killing spam won’t be easy, but going after the money could be our best bet for an end to the junk mail menace.
-Shlok
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