All You Ever Wanted To Know About Anti-Spam Laws
It's certainly a good read if you have the time, here's a tidbit to get you started:
Last year, students in my Cyberlaw Clinic and in Stanford's Computer Science Department banded together to analyze spyware transmissions. It wasn't easy, and maybe was impossible to track some of the off-shore purveyors, but government agencies and private companies with more resources should be able to do the same thing for many spammers."
The only thing that can be said with anything even close certainty is that it's always best to get to the root of a problem before contemplating a solution. What is the real underlying problem for people who try (and sometimes succeed) in scamming people out of money online? Greed? Socioeconomic inequities that characterize the current global economy and/or capitalism in general? If these are major factors then we may have to consider the possibility that we will never be rid of spammers and malware because the conditions that create the problem in the first place may have more benefit than spam is harmful and annoying. We'll keep changing security measures and they'll keep adapting. We'll toss one in jail, more will spring up out of the woodworks.