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Sex swindles, credit card cons, dubious diet plans, drugs to grow hair and other body parts -- if it arrives in an unsolicited e-mail, the Federal Trade Commission wants it.
Since 1998, the Federal Trade Commission has asked people to forward any and all spam to a special e-mail address: "uce@ftc.gov."
Consequently, the FTC now has the most complete spam database in the world, a collection of over 20 million missives containing the solutions to all human wants and woes.
But what do they do with all that spam?
"I always figured uce@ftc.gov was a government-sponsored virtual garbage can," said Mick Ventura, a Manhattan systems administrator. "My tax dollars at work -- make spam go away by auto-forwarding it to the FTC, they'll do your deleting for you."
Perish the thought. Delete is a dirty word to the FTC.
The commission has carefully saved every single spam ever sent to them. There are probably even a few messages from good old Dave Rhodes -- widely and probably erroneously considered the first spammer -- in that database.
But the FTC's junk mail hoard may not be around much longer.
"This year there's been a huge rise in the amount of spam we receive," said Brian Huseman, a staff attorney for the FTC. "We probably won't be able to afford to store them all much longer."
The FTC now gets around 70,000 forwarded spams a day. Last year, they received about 40,000 pieces a day. Three years ago, that mailbox received about 4,000 missives daily, and in 1998 the entire year's take was fewer than 100 spams.
The FTC's spam collection is neatly sorted into "libraries" viewable by date received or subject matter. The spam can also be searched and sorted using keywords like "Opportunity," "Hi! and "Free!"
Six FTC employees are in charge of the spam database's contents.
"No one sits down and actually reads all the spam that we receive daily," Huseman said. "That would be incredibly boring and totally futile. We read selected spams when we're investigating a specific issue."
The FTC uses a content management application from Convera to search the database, dubbed "The Refrigerator" by FTC employees in reference to the large white server that houses the collection.
Huseman said the commission is now looking into ways of storing only the spam samples that would be useful in law enforcement actions. The FTC has warned and prosecuted spammers in the past, and Huseman said the agency plans to dramatically ramp up those efforts over the next year.
"I can't give out any details yet, but I can tell you that stopping fraudulent spam has become a major priority here," Huseman said.
The FTC can only legally pursue cases where there are clear instances of spam being used to perpetuate a scam or conduct fraudulent business activities.
"The test is: Does the spam make a representation, an offer of some sort of product or service? Is that representation false? And would an average consumer believe that the representation was true?" Huseman explained. "If those conditions are met, the FTC can act."
"The FTC is in a bad place," Laura Atkins, president of anti-spam organization SpamCon, said. "Their mandate doesn't let them prosecute spam in general; they have to prosecute for things like fraud and deception. Within the constraints of what they can do, I think they're doing a good job."
Bait-and-switch and pyramid schemes, attempts to bilk people from money via chain letters, credit-repair scams, bogus weight-loss programs and a myriad of other fraudulent business "opportunities" have attracted the FTC's legal attention.
The FTC also has helped train several thousand law enforcement agents throughout the United States and Canada in methods used to investigate criminally fraudulent spam and other Internet fraud.
Huseman said that the contents of the spam database indicate that many spammers simply imitate what other spammers have already done, and that they may not be aware of state or federal laws that prohibit deceptive advertising claims in all media, including e-mail.
Some anti-spam activists, like Atkins, wish the FTC would share its spam collection.
"It would be great if we could get our hands on the information in there to do tracking and some statistics on the amount, type and severity of spam," Atkins said.
Huseman said the FTC shares spam and statistics with local and federal law enforcement, but can't pass along data to private organizations due to privacy concerns.
"The spam is stored just as it was sent in the database," Huseman explained. "Purging personally identifiable information from all that spam wouldn't be possible."
Not content with its millions of collected spams, the FTC still wants more, Huseman said.
Just make sure to include the full e-mail header and to forward the entire message if it's in HTML format. Simply copying and pasting the spam doesn't give the FTC the information it needs to track down spammers.
