Re: FTC crackdown on spam

From: Ryan Gibson <ryan_at_kbitraining.com>
Date: Thu 18 Apr 2002 07:55:31 -0600

My personal belief is that the FTC Spam crackdown is only effective at
deterring scams. You will still get 100 mortgage offers, 2000 offers to
build a $399 website, and 1,000 messages that say "we can submit you to
the search engines!" So does this crackdown help! No, it is a law
similar to "Prohibition" where the government is trying to show efforts
to stop spam and scams, but trully, spam "drunk" marketers will continue
to use spam if it gives them a "high"-return.

It's also difficult to follow, as rogue service providers in China,
Latin America, Asia Pacific, and Eastern Europe are out of most
jurisdictions and are literally impossible to chase, as blocking their
servers means blocking a few continents. Wexford University is a good
example of this. Where they actually created 20 sites that where
"Instituites" supporting the MBA they offered. They then spammed the
universe and people, some in the Colleges in your local area, received
MBA's from this University after writing papers and a few exams. (Which
no doubt they sold to University Students) It turns out that their MBA
is not accredited. This is fraud and a scam, but they are located at a
PO Box in Zurich, their domain owner is in Hungary, and researched more,
on the boarder of Romania. They are still spamming today, and have not
been stopped. So I suppose, the FTC is doing it to make the Telcos and
consumer happy, but they can not do much more than take away the
throw-away servers the spammers are using.

I personally believe that it comes down to the control of the lists and
economic cycles. I am dissappointed all domain name owners emails and
contact information became public, that servers where not as secure as
they should have been in the "beginning", and now we are all part of a
"Mega Database." The sad thing, is that most people think their ISP is
selling their client lists to the spammers when they are spammed. The
bad press is not what will hinder email marketing, it is the actual
increase in spam, and therefore, the decrease in the effectiveness of
email marketing. Not to mention, in a down economy, people have less
leisure time to read email advertisements, so they will go straight to
the recycle bin...unless your target market is not effected by the
"economic outlook" and then you should still get a 0.5%-3% conversion to
sales. However, economic cycles show that the effectiveness of email
marketing will return and now is the time to take marketshare by
"building the lists", and filtering-out the spammers, so that within the
next two years you can benefit from a return in consumer confidence and
increased purchases on the Internet. All the market is waiting for is a
return in economic and consumer confidence.

Sincerely,

Ryan A Gibson
Director of Marketing and Business Development
Ryan_at_kbitraining.com
Ph: 604-331-4471
Cell: 604-831-3400
Fax: 604-331-4478
www.kbitraining.com
 
Suite 410 938 Howe St.
Vancouver, BC
V6Z 1N9




Received on Thu Apr 18 2002 - 08:55:31 CDT