“The FTC has won a court order shutting down a spam operation that allegedly emailed millions of internet users with sexually explicit messages in order to drive traffic to its website. The emails urged recipients to ‘date lonely wife’. Users would be under the impression they would be going to an website for women wanting casual relationships. According to the FTC, the operation’s websites solicited consumers to purchase access to the defendants’ main membership site. It alleges ‘in a four month period alone, defendants took in nearly $700,000 in membership fees.’ It said U.S. District Court Judge Amy St. Eve, presiding in Chicago, issued an order freezing the assets of the operation, which officials said ‘violates nearly every provision of the CAN-SPAM Act.’ ‘It contains misleading headers and deceptive subject lines. It does not contain a link to allow consumers to opt out of receiving future spam, does not contain a valid postal address, and does not contain the disclosure, required by law, that it is sexually explicit,’ the FTC said in a statement. The commission also said messages contained ’sexual materials in the initially viewable area of the email’, in violation of the FTC’s Adult Labeling Rule.” —SC Magazine (US)

Spam is a fucking nightmare. It clogs up inboxes, wastes bandwidth and computer processing power, and causes untold loss of human productivity. What’s more, it doesn’t just affect email anymore. It pollutes message boards and blog-style sites such as PervScan, which is why all the comments here are now moderated.

That being said, PervScan also finds spam fascinating and skims a fair amount of it for educational purposes — to see what techniques spammers are using, to see what sorts of products they’re promoting, and so forth. For spam has definitely evolved over the years. One of the more prominent trends is that porn spam still makes up a significant portion of comment spam but makes up a smaller portion of email spam. Out of the hundreds of spams PervScan receives at various email addresses, only five percent or so is related to porn. Most of it promotes pharmaceuticals, mortgages, and poker. And weirdly, because PervScan has absolutely no interest in pharmaceuticals, mortgages, or poker, it has started to miss porn spam — a little. At least porn spam could inspire some degree of interest in anyone interested in sex. Mortgage spam does nothing but waste space.

So is porn spam a dying breed? Curious to find out, PervScan set up a test gmail account and signed up for a bunch of different mailing lists. Over the course of two months, it has received email from the lists — but not a single additional bit of spam, let alone porn spam. Maybe it will take a few months longer for the address to spread. Want to send porn spam to PervScan? Fire away to sendmepornspam@gmail.com. PervScan will monitor the account and, if it receives anything interesting, maybe do a story about it. (P.S. It goes without saying that anyone desiring to contact PervScan for other reasons should continue to use the contact form above.)

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