Gangs of spammers are moving to Britain to exploit a legal loophole that allows them to bombard e-mail in-boxes with impunity, anti-spam experts warned yesterday.
Campaigners have claimed the gangs are moving from countries such as Italy, where they face severe financial penalties or prison, to Britain, where the most they can expect is a five-thousand-pound fine. No spam operator has been fined in the UK, and the gangs see the country as a soft touch.
Unsolicited junk mail accounts for more than 70 percent of all e-mail. Industry experts predict this will increase to 80 percent by the end of the year and to 90 percent by next summer.
The anti-spam organization Spamhaus claims that UK legislation introduced last December, allowing unsolicited e-mails to be sent to business addresses but not to personal ones, has been seen by spammers as giving them free rein to interpret the law as it suits them and to spam anyone they like.
Steve Linford, Spamhaus's founder, said the law was full of "gigantic loopholes" and its punitive measures are derisory.
Britain, he warned, was on course to become one of the world's fastest-growing sources of spam and was already 10th in the table of the worst spamming countries.
Linford said at least one major Italian spam gang had moved its operations to Britain because spammers can receive up to three years in prison in Italy simply for sending unsolicited mail. When Spamhaus exposed its practices, the gang tried to mount a campaign against it, sending fake e-mails purporting to have come from the group.
Linford regularly receives death threats from spam gangs because of his campaign. He said: "We get all sorts of threats from the American spammers, from `We are coming to shoot you' to `The next package you open will blow you out of the country.'"
One death threat said: "You are a dead man. As God is my witness you will die soon horrid [sic] violent death [sic]."
British e-mail marketing companies have not resorted to such extreme measures. Instead, they are using the loopholes to threaten Spamhaus with potentially devastating legal action if it continues to name them as spammers and to block their mass mails targeted at business addresses.
Spam, according to British legislation, is "unsolicited e-mail sent without the consent of the addressee and without any attempt at targeting recipients who are likely to be interested in its contents." The law bans only the spamming of private e-mail addresses.
The law, say campaigners, allows spammers to claim their e-mails are intended to go only to business addresses when they go to all and sundry.
In the UK a fine faces those who spam private addresses and fail to stop doing so if a complaint is made.
But a fine has never been handed down and, according to insiders, is unlikely to be because no extra funds or staff to deal with the problem were put in place.
"This comes as quite a surprise to us, because any normal person and any British business who is inundated with spam is fed up with the stuff. More and more UK spammers are starting up because they are seeing that there's no action against spammers," he said.
Others are simply frauds. A major concern now is the expansion of Russian gangs, who offer to attack other businesses computers by sending viruses.
"Russian spam gangs are now a big problem on the internet," said Linford. "These gangs will attack computer networks around the world for you, and that is a much more serious form of spamming.
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