OECD Spam Workshop

I am in Brussels at the moment having just finished attending an OECD conference on the scourge of the Internet. No, not NZ Pundit, but spam.

Around 250 people from all 30 OECD countries were there (I was attending on behalf of InternetNZ) representing governments, industry, and consumer groups.

The spam problem has been getting worse with the latest statistics being that spam is now up to 60% of all e-mail (was 7% two years ago). The only good thing about this is it has changed from an annoyance to a major cost, hence governments and industry are focusing on putting the major spammers out of business through a mixture of lawsuits and technology.

We heard how some of the major spammers are hard core criminals who are involved in cocaine smuggling and money laundering also. The ones behind the phishing (spam e-mails forged to look like from a bank so you hand your account details over) are in the same category.