The Okopipi Project

Apology accepted. Please calm down and try to help. Mine was certainly a radical suggestion, but I am not clear if you have a better alternative. Is your solution credit card fraud? I was reacting in desperation to a discussion that was already going on about faking credit card numbers because this is clearly highly illegal. If Okopipi tries to act outside the law it is doomed. Are any SPAM products really as advertised? I can't think of any. There are usually so many crap claims in the SPAM ads that it would be very easy to contest one. For example, the drug ads that claim to be from "certified" pharmacies. Certified by who? Prove it or I won't pay. Spammers would never take these cases to court. There would be too many, and it would draw attention to their false advertising. If I dispute a sale quickly enough it does not get charged to my credit card. A pre-paid credit card would have very limited financial exposure.

Credit card numbers has 16 digits. There is a check sum. So if you just try any random number, there's a 90% chance the website can tell immediately that it is invalid. It also means that you can just try 10 times, and are likely to pass the check sum test. Or you can get the actual algorithm and make sure all numbers you try always pass the check sum test. There's a good explanation at http://www.beachnet.com/~hstiles/cardtype.html

Besides that, the first few digits are pre-assigned, Visa always start with 4xxx, Mastercard always starts with 51xx-55xx.

Once the card number pass the initial test, the website submits the number to the payment gateway / bank, who then querries Visa / Mastercard / etc. From the first few digits of the card, the credit card company can tell which bank issued the card, they querry the issuing bank, who then checks if the number is valid, belongs to a valid account, that has not been suspended / reported lost, is not over the limit, etc.

Some payment gateways charge for each querry, even failed ones. Others may suspend the account if there appear to be any hacking (too many invalid numbers within a certain period). Either way, you are actually causing actual damage to the spammer. Could the spammer sue you for the losses caused by you? Probably.

Is it credit card fraud, to deliberately put in card numbers that are not yours? Don't know. But if you put in 100 transactions with fake credit card numbers, I doubt Visa or Mastercard will be happy. If you put in 1 fake transaction, nobody will bother paying any attention.

But if you run a website (okopipi), that organize a group of people (us), who then put in 100,000 fake transactions, the website will most likely be shut down, and the ring leaders (Alan) will get a visit from the police. The spammer's lawyers will then sue us.

I considered putting in fake orders, but never did, because it's just too time consuming. Wading through about 100 - 200 spam everyday is bad enough, takes me about 5 minutes, I don't want to compound the problem by spending 3 minutes placing each order. It cost me more time than the spammer, who can simply ignore all those rejected transactions that bounce back from the credit card company.

Looking at the URL, I think it likely that some of the spammers are not those companies themselves, but "freelancers" who abuse the affiliate program run by these companies.

Even clicking on the URL in the email may not be a good idea. If a website pays 0.03 cent per click-through, simply clicking on that URL may actually reward the spammer.

Just thought I would let you know I'm leaving town for 4 days so I'm gonna start up spamitback before I leave and run it all four days if it doesn't lock up lookout I will have one hell of a score LOL