14 DAY TRIAL // A study performed by researchers from US and Hungary determined that the vast majority of spam-related transactions are processed through only three banks, which could offer a weak spot in the entire ecosystem for spam fighters to target.
The findings were presented in a research paper [pdf] titled "Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain" released by researchers from University of California at San Diego, University of California at Berkeley and Budapest University of Technology and Economics.
The researchers have analyzed a billion spam messages and applied additional criteria to restrict their research set to around 300 million emails that advertised pharmaceuticals, replica items and counterfeit software.
The spam merchandise was being sold through 70,000 domains and originated from 45 different affiliate programs. The researchers intentionally made around 120 purchases in order to track the money.
The purpose of the research was to analyze the ecosystem and determine is there is any common resource shared by these operations that spam fighters could target.
They discovered several ones that are worth mentioning. For example, 40 of domains involved in the analyzed spam campaigns were registered through the Russian company Naunet, while Romanian ISP Evolva Telecom hosted 10 percent of DNS and web servers.
However, the most important discovery was that 95% of these spam operations use only a handful of banks to process credit card transactions.
They are Azerigazbank in Azerbaijan, St. Kitts & Nevis Anguilla National Bank in St. Kitts and the Latvian DnB. It was observed over the course of several months that spam affiliate programs change financial institutions, but they mainly rotate between these ones.
The researchers propose the creation of a blacklist for banks that work with spammers which credit card companies could use to refuse transactions to.
"If the credit card companies wanted to shut down the spammers, we can easily aid them in rapidly and unambiguously identifying the merchant accounts used by spammers," Dr. Stefan Savage of the University of California, San Diego, told The New York Times. "The defenders can, in principle, identify which banks the scammers are using far faster than they can get new banks, and for basically zero cost," he added.