Study Says Spam Can Be Cut by Blocking Card Transactions

There is hope in the battle against spam. The New York Times is reporting on a study that has identified a weak point in the spam chain. See Study Says Spam Can Be Cut by Blocking Card Transactions – NYTimes.com.
The study by Kirill Levchenko and colleagues is titled, Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain (PDF of unpublished manuscript). They followed up on a lot of spam ads and bought thousands of dollars of stuff (like Viagra.) They then analyzed the chain of servers and services that make spam a viable business. The weak point is the credit card processing, because this is a business and some money has to be gathered at some point to finance it. There are a small number of banks that process the credit card transactions, and these banks may be vulnerable to political pressure.

Finally, we have used this data to provide a normative analysis of spam intervention approaches and to offer evidence that the payment tier is by far the most concentrated and valuable asset in the spam ecosystem, and one for which there may be a truly effective intervention through public policy action in Western countries. (p. 15)