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Spam will cost US organizations more than $10 billion this year, according to Ferris Research Inc., a San Francisco consulting group (Krim, 2003). That amount is greater than the gross national product of Albania, Jamaica and Belize combined. (World Resources Institute, 1996) According to Krim, “roughly 40 percent of all e-mail traffic in the United States is spam, up from 8 percent in late 2001 and nearly doubling in the past six months.” Krim’s sources also expect the increase to continue. Recently, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) performed an analysis of 1,000 unsolicited emails that were submitted to its uce@ftc.gov e-mail address. (McGuire, 2003) “The address,” according to McGuire, “stands for unsolicited commercial e-mail” and serves to provide a forwarding point of spam email to federal authorities. McGuire states that “there is no federal law against sending spam, though the FTC can prosecute bulk e-mailers who send deceptive or false information.” For example, the FTC charged one recent defendant in this manner by way of unfair and deceptive practices, violations of the FTC Act. (FTC, 2002) Additional highlights from the 2003 FTC Spam Report that McGuire covered include the following: · Business opportunity/investment messages comprised most of the spam described in the report, accounting for about 20 percent of the e-mail. Adult-oriented spam was second with 18 percent of the total sample. · 90 percent of business opportunity/investment spam contained fraudulent text. · 96 percent of the business opportunity/investment messages contained false information in the body text or the “from” and “subject” areas. · Only 2 percent of spam messages used the abbreviation ADV (advertisement) in their subject lines, as required by law in several states, including California, Colorado, Indiana and Kansas (http://www.spamlaws.com/state/summary.html). Businesses Fight Back: State Legislation of Spam Presently, about 30 states have enacted state laws to make it illegal to send unsolicited e-mail messages without first meeting certain conditions, such as the “ADV” prefix mentioned above. In addition, some states such as Arkansas, Colorado and Delaware make it illegal to use falsified routing information, which prevents a recipient from knowing the origin of the e-mail.
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