How come countries don't seem to do enough to stop spammers?

Seriously, why not just refuse to trade with countries that allow spamming and other such operations? Or even get the police to bust more of these operations?

Surely if they use sweatshops and stuff it can't be too hard to simply shut them down? Or even just arrest the people working there?

Or when it comes to Xrumor and the like, just arrest the people behind it? Heck, maybe just wait until one of them leaves Russia and arrest them there and then, because it can't be legal in many places to make software designed specifically to spam websites.

What do you think of all this?

 

As a software developer, I think it's fairly easy to write spam software, and/or use existing (and often standard open-source) software packages, so it's relatively difficult to locate and/or try the people who wrote it. (general spamming)

For forums-related software, there are so many attack vectors, that spam software that can use a forum's interface is a relatively small problem. In some countries with low salaries, people can physically sit there to operate a forum for spamming.

The solution is to improve spam filters (spam filters work pretty well for e-mail nowadays, so it should be possible for forums as well), and to protect forums against intrusion (which might be much more important).

Russia BTW has laws against spamming and catches huge commercial spam operations occasionally. But it's very difficult to catch a group of hobbyists or similar that has excellent IT knowledge and wants to make a few bucks on the side. IT people from Russia are comparatively well educated.

Truly criminal spammers are using bot-nets of enslaved home and/or office computers and web servers. Those bot-nets are traded on the so-called "black internet", a shadow culture of shady websites. So the problem has much larger proportions than you might possibly think. To fight organized crime and criminal behavior from people in general is a problem in many countries, including the US.

There are hordes of people in low-pay countries like India who would volunteer in a manual spam operation. If those generate enough money, they probably use sophisticated software written specifically for that purpose and using one or more bot-nets.

 

Countries can not even bust guys selling drugs on the streets or even guys stealing cars. Now these are people who are easy to catch, but a spammer/ spammers are more sophisticated than you might imagine. The government just doesn't have the time let alone resources to catch these crooks.

 

Good points, but the answer in a nutshell is Money. Many countries will turn a blind eye to scamming and spamming as it brings in much needed overseas money.

As an example it is believed that in Nigeria the money from overseas comes in this order. First is oil. second is minerals and the third is fraud (scamming) etc.
Many officials will turn a blind eye to this. Indeed we also see quite a few internet personalities accept bribes or are blackmailed into supporting the scammers.

Unfortunately there are countries where spamming is not illegal or is in a "Grey" area.

There are some advanced mass emailing type programs that are being sold in such countries. I am currently working against such a guy in India and those who support him at the moment.
The money involved in making such advanced systems is very large and shows how much money is involved in these spams and scams.

After the "cold war" there were some very highly trained IT guys who became available for hire from Russia. Some "traded" their hacking knowledge with some of the successful scammers, for knowledge of how to scam with the "419 advance fee " type scams.

This shows how they can be successful in scamming and spamming.

Not too long ago yahoo deleted over four million spammer accounts in a very short time frame. but this only resulted in a small blip in spamming activity, as the spammers just opened new accounts and carried on.