Who controls the garbage traffic on the Internet?

They operate from countries where the practice is not prohibited, as the international organization Spamhaus, which takes eight years to fight against spam. Sending unsolicited emails (spam) on drugs, fast loans or pornography: the pirates make money to receive a percentage of sales of products and many of them using personal computers for users themselves to carry out the spam. In the United States and the European Union that practice is prohibited by law, but 64% of emails received are now spam.

That means the spam is not just a nuisance. His wealth is jammed Internet. About 55,000 million unsolicited emails are sent every day.

Who creates and sends all this huge amount of spam? The non-profit organization Spamhaus, based in the UK which carries eight years struggling against this activity, has published a list of the 10 biggest spammers. According to the state, this small group is responsible for about 80% of spam that is received in Western Europe and the United States. The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) of the United States last year and warned: “Although there are hundreds of thousands of people that cause this problem, the majority of spam comes from a small group of them.”

In the EU and U.S., junk mail is illegal. In Spain, send e-mails without permission of the person who receives it is expressly forbidden by the Law on Services of the Information Society (LSSI) 2002. But these pirates are changing networks and countries very often, and take advantage of lax standards of states like Russia or China and tax havens. Above all, take advantage of low international collaboration. According to recognize the past year, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), “the legislation is not going to stop, by itself, the spammers who want to make a profit.”

And it is good business. It is true that the level of response from Internet users is very low, only 15 people per million corresponds to a junk mail. But the spammers can get to send one million e-mails in less than an hour, so the profitability that profit with the push of a button is very high, and immediately. Criminals get a variable percentage of each subscription or purchase. The most popular products are drugs (36%), financial (19%) and pornography (14%) as reported by the security company Ipswich.

Where to find the offenders email addresses? They do not need great knowledge of technology, but rather in psychology. Collect addresses on personal pages and blogs, on pages where they trap an e-mail seeking to achieve some shows

Free and strings of jokes that users forwarded to friends without hiding the email addresses of others.

Once achieved, the spammer sends the message, using a single e-mail or through different addresses and servers. But criminals are refining their techniques and are beginning to use computers of their victims. The idea is to penetrate the PC connected to the Internet that are not properly protected and used as zombies who forwarded the emails to the orders of the offender. Experts estimate that 40% of spam is sent as a result of this technique.