RE: Trolling for dollars: scammers hard at work

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

The 800 number for "Do not call" registration for the East Coast went
live last week (sorry, I recycled that paper, so I don't have it), but
apparently one's registration won't "take" for a while. There is
supposedly a law against junk fax, and there are several pieces of
legislation in the works against spam (see August PC World, "Uncle
Sam vs Spam"; also take a look at the article on the ink scam artists).
The problem, of course, is the law of unintended consequences: everyone
is afraid that blocking spam will end up being used against First
Amendment rights of free speech.
	One cannot help wondering: wouldn't earning an honest living be a lot
easier than perpetrating these scams? But there's no excuse for the
lackadaisical attitude on the part of PayPal and the ISPs: it's their
servers that are being used. (Hmm, now if we applied the common-law
provisions about accessories, before or after the fact...?)
Patricia