Calling the Internet Police?

Reader Jennifer Resuta writes: I have received a bunch of fake lottery mails from "England," "Africa," and so on. What do I do about this? Who do I report it to? Where does one get info about internet police?

The internet police? Whoa. I don't know if that sounds like a cool idea or a scary one.

The reality is that there is no organization that polices the internet for criminal activity, and for better or worse that's what gives the web its uniqueness. Think of the internet as the Old West, where law is maintained only through an uneasy and largely unspoken agreement among communities, while vigilantes and outlaws end up sparring from time to time.

While the net is on the whole a law-abiding place, we all know there are some bad apples in the bunch who infect websites with spyware and send scam instant messages. Nowhere is this worse than in the realm of email: The aggravating majority of all mail traffic is now spam.

So what can you do about bringing spammers to justice? Not a lot. Though it may feel like you get a lot of spam, you are really just a drop in the bucket. You could report it to your ISP or an anti-spam organization, but most organizations like Spamhaus (which tracks spammers worldwide) actively discourage individual abuse reports. The FBI and Secret Service have jurisdiction over electronic, financial crimes in the U.S. (and, yes, sending spam is illegal), but unless you've lost money (and a substantial amount of it), they aren't going to investigate an individual spam message. There's just too much of it, and the feds do know about the worst spammers already; most of them live in foreign countries outside the easy reach of the law. (If you have been defrauded, the Internet Crime Complaint Center should be your first stop. If you fear a physical threat, contact your local police.)

So how should you handle plain old spam, the kind you get every day? If you use webmail, click the "mark as spam" button. If you use an offline mail client, install a spam filter and use it religiously. (I use SpamBayes.) Nearly all ISPs also offer their own anti-spam services, which you should use in addition to your own protection. With multiple layers of protection, you shouldn't see more than a couple of spams getting through to you every day. But as for becoming an anti-spam vigilante, trying to run the bad guys out of town, well, there's just no upside to it.