Dateline tracks down a porn spammer

John Hockenberry Correspondent

What if every day in your neighborhood, this happens: The doorbell rings, you go to answer it, but there’s no one there. Yet on the doorstep you find X-rated leaflets. You didn’t order it, didn’t pay for it, or subscribe to it. Still there it is — every day, week after week.

And what if your kids answer the door? Now it’s your kids who might see these pictures.

Well something like this is actually happening, but it isn’t outside on the doorstep, it’s inside your house. And the pictures aren’t wrapped up in nice brown paper.

An invasion of unwanted porn
Raw porn is on display on computers all over America whenever people open their e-mail.

Julie, a mother from suburban Texas, has had enough. "They just keep on coming," she says.

But Julie got an e-mail one day that topped it all — one that showed sex with animals.

This porn invasion is legal. The sleazy senders are anonymous and they could be anywhere on the globe. But why would anyone want to send free porn to people who haven’t asked for it? 

Simple: These are free samples sent by someone trying to sell online subscriptions to porn Web sites. Just like Penthouse or Hustler try to sell subscriptions, porn Web sites sell subscriptions too. The idea is to entice you to see more.

But these angry parents don’t want porn subscriptions. And they would love to know who is sending them this stuff.

“Spammers transmit literally billions of e-mail messages a day,” says Ray Everett Church, a full-time spam fighter. He runs a coalition that’s fighting for laws to protect consumers from the spamming industry, which takes in according to some estimates, more than $20 billion a year — though not all from porn. And it’s an industry that’s almost totally unregulated.

“What we are seeing today is very much the Wild West, the wild frontier where the laws just aren’t there yet to catch up to what all of the bad guys are doing to make money,” says Church.

If a porn spammer is based in the United States, all he has to do is write the phrase “sexually explicit” on the mail and it’s all perfectly legal. Problem is, many spammers are outside the United States. American laws can’t touch them.

And if you wanted to get the name of the person sending you the offensive e-mails and pictures, you can’t just call your Internet provider because privacy laws restrict them from giving you that information.

“The same rules that protect my personal information and yours at that service provider also protects a potential spammer or pornographer,” says Everett Church.

But if the government can’t go after all the spammers, what if someone who got one of the e-mails wanted to find one of them and stop him? What are the odds?

“If you can find the real person without an army of lawyers, without millions of dollars of research staff and investigators, if you could find the individual who actually clicked that mouse and sent that message — it would be a sight to see,” says Everett Church.

Could we could find them? Unmask them? Drag them out from the anonymity of cyberspace, and find them wherever they are, in any corner of the world? Could we actually get one of these people to take responsibility for sending this stuff?

This sounds like a mission for a Dateline Hidden Camera Investigation. Undercover and going with our gut, we’ll follow the trail until we literally return to sender.

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