Flood of spam complaints for Internal Affairs team

The Government's anti-spam team received 155 complaints from the public about spam e-mails during the first week that the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act was in force.

One of the challenges facing the Internal Affairs investigators is the risk involved in clicking on messages that most computer users are warned to delete without opening, says unit manager Joe Stewart.

Mr Stewart says 10 of the first batch of complaints concerned spam that had sexual content. The department is obliged to investigate those under the Act and Mr Stewart says that will be the unit's top priority.

"We have got to be really careful looking at the complaints, because what we have got there is an evidential copy. We can't risk letting malware escape, so we have got to extract it, leave the evidential copy fully intact with all the malware attached and then bring it across and start to work on it, and we need to have an audit trail so we can tell the court what we have done.

"Our major objective is to capture all the tracking and routing information so we can find out if it came from within New Zealand, in which case we can deal with it, or whether it came from overseas in which case we will deal with the overseas agency."

Mr Stewart couldn't say how many of the complaints received so far had substance. Two that were received on the day the Act came into force were about messages sent by businesses to check whether they had permission to e-mail customers, in their attempts to comply with the anti-spam legislation, he says.

The Act made it an offence to send a single unsolicited e-mail if it was of a commercial nature. But in practice enforcement may partly be a numbers game.

"If we get a lot of complaints about a particular company's behaviour under the Act, then we will give them a call and encourage their voluntary compliance," Mr Stewart says.

The department has been advised by overseas agencies of two known spammers living in New Zealand.

Mr Stewart says it couldn't begin monitoring their activities till the Act came into force. It was too soon to tell if they had ceased their activities.

He says that in addition to complaints, the unit received 300 e-mail queries during its first week, some asking "very specific questions" to which it will take time to respond.

There has been good support from businesses and bodies such as the Marketing Association and InternetNZ, he says.

"Everybody wants too comply with the Act which is fantastic."

- © Fairfax NZ News