From USA Today:
The arrest of notorious spammer Robert Alan Soloway, 27, on criminal charges for continuing to spread junk e-mail raised cheers in the tech security community.
But Soloway’s arrest Wednesday in Seattle won’t slow down the tidal wave of spam. Unwanted commercial e-mail has become big business, backed by organized crime. Most of it originates from networks of compromised home PCs, called zombies.
The spam deluge includes record levels of unsolicited e-mail ads for subprime loans, herbal remedies and get-rich-quick schemes. It includes phishing mail that lures recipients into typing sensitive data on bogus websites. There’s also “pharm” spam pitching fake pharmaceutical drugs. And stock spam dupes recipients into helping drive up prices of moribund stocks.
“This is the modern face of the e-mail threat,” says Adam O’Donnell, director of emerging technology at message security firm Cloudmark. “Spam makes money.”
The only way to stop spammers is for everyone to ignore and delete everything they send. I don’t think people are smart enough to do that and as long as people insist on clicking and ordering, it will never stop.