Spammers hide behind the Great Wall

The spam chain is complex. Basically, though, most people responsible for sending spam are based in the US, though a growing number are now organized criminals in Eastern Europe and Russia. China is the location of choice for the servers that host the spammers' websites and for buying and selling lists of spam zombies, or personal computers (PCs) deliberately infected with spam-enabling viruses.

Each spam message invariably contains a link to a site where the tiny minority that respond (perhaps 0.1% of the total) can complete their transactions. Most of these sites - some 68% of them, according to a report released by anti-spam firm Commtouch in October - are to be found on servers based in China. In addition, according to Steve Linford, president of Spamhaus, a London-based spam-blocking service, China also dominates the market for buying and selling lists of zombie PCs, which are peddled by virus writers on Internet forums also found on Chinese servers.

Why China? Quite simply, because it is the only major market where spammers can do just about anything they want. Spamming remains legal, and persuading police to act against those providing them services has proved next to impossible. As Linford says: "They choose China because of the website hosting. For proxies you can use Brazil, Argentina, Russia. But the Internet service providers in [these places] will kill their websites straight away. This is the crux of the problem."