The Joe Job
I covered the complaint game
yesterday, but there is an aspect of this that rates its own topic, the Joe
Job. A Joe Job is a term used to
describe fraudulent spam. People are
rabid when it comes to spam. They cease
to think rationally and instantly have one focus, terminate the spammer.
The way they attempt to do this is by complaining to the
ISP that the spammer is using to access the Internet, demanding that the ISP
police its user, usually via account termination. Spam fighting is viewed as a noble cause; real spam costs real
money in clean up fees when it overloads network resources. Spam can get in the way of retrieving important
e-mail if you are a dial-up user. So
ISP’s police it, terminating accounts of those that abuse their network.
The Internet is built on the concept of self-policing, it
has enabled it to flourish. But in the
case of spam, it has also made it ripe for abuse. The problem with self-policing when it relates to spam is that
everyone considers themselves to be the police, not the ISP who’s user sent the
spam. They don’t request that the ISP
take action, they demand it, often sending multiple complaints per perceived
offense. They demand that the account
they think sent it, be terminated. No
other solution is viable. They often
pursue this with ferocity.
In steps the Joe Job.
The Joe Job capitalizes on this army of anti-spam pit bulls. The person executing the Joe Job will use
this army in his own agenda. That
agenda is often someone with which they are engaged in a fierce
debate/flamewar. It’s an aspect of the complaint game, get many complaining, more complaints
means it is more likely to end in account termination. So they forge spam to look like it came from
this person.
This is very effective when the user has a web site or
on-line business. Mass e-mailings and
discussion board postings are guaranteed to unleash the anti-spam hounds. Soon that ISP is being bombarded by
complaints and demands to terminate that account. This is just what the Joe Jobber wanted. The ISP is under lots of pressure to
terminate the account, and those that aren’t wary to the Joe Job often do.
So the next time you get spam and are ready to fire off that
complaint, stop and think. Are you positive
that this obvious piece of spam is not a Joe Job. Are you playing into a Joe Jobbers hand?
/steve
11/02/2000
