Security software firm Symantec and the SA Chapter of the Internet Society (ISOC-ZA) will offer a bounty for the successful conviction of spammers, as part of an education drive to highlight the e-mail problem.
The bounty programme will run from January to June and will offer R7 500 for getting an alleged spammer to pay an admission of guilt fine, R15 000 for a conviction in a magistrates court and R30 000 for a High Court conviction.
ISOC-ZA chairman Alan Levin says the bounty is offered to encourage South Africans to document and bring proof about any alleged spammer to a court of law, and follow through with what could be a long and arduous process.
"Spamming is a problem and in a country such as ours, where bandwidth is an expensive commodity, it is actually stealing," he says.
Spamming, the continuous unsolicited receiving of e-mails offering goods or services for sale, is a worldwide problem. Symatec's latest Internet Security Threat Report estimates 55% of all e-mails sent globally is spam. Postini, another Internet security vendor, estimates nine out of 10 e-mails are now spam.
Springboard
Premlan Padayachi, Symantec Africa's consumer country manager, says while SA does not have the same level of spam problems as other countries, it is a growing threat.
"We are coming across cases where the end-user almost has no control over their bandwidth. There have been instances where 3GB of bandwidth (some people's monthly cap) has been eaten in three hours due to spam," he says.
Padayachi says while there are relatively few known cases of South African companies spamming, it does not mean that a lot of spam actually originates from here and pretends to come from overseas locations.
"A springboard technique is often employed to bounce e-mails and so the spam looks as though it originates from a foreign destination rather than from here," he says.
Mousetrap
Mike Silber, a lawyer with e-law firm Michalsons Attorneys, says the main hurdle to obtaining a conviction is that the governing legislation, the Electronic Communications and Transactions (ECT) Act, is not well written and not enforced properly.
"It is very difficult for anyone to go to their local police station and lay a charge in terms of the ECT Act," he says.
Dave Gale, an anti-spam advocate and Storm's new business director, says he is tempted to go after the bounty, but the problem is that the law is weak and strengthening it won't necessarily solve the problem.
"I believe it will always be a tech battle between the guys finding ways to get it through and the guys stopping it. Time and effort lead most of us to taking the building-a-better-mousetrap approach," Gale says.
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