Slashdot Mirror
Is Forged Spam a Crime?
PJRC2 writes "ABC News.com has an article about a man who claims he commited no crime in sending millions of AOL users porn and make-money-fast spam and making the messages appear as though they came from ibm.net. " We're going to see more of this in the future. I think forged spam should be punishable by death, but I probably get more of it than most people ;)
Wouldn't this count as Trademark Infringement? Since domain names have precedent as being covered under Trademark law, shouldn't abuse of domain names also fall under Trademark/IP law? Unfortunatly this would put the onus on the abused company to do anything. Matbe IBM should get in on the action.
However, there are always a certain percentage of readers who know about these forgeries, and the spammer will lose his account eventually anyways. Btw, there is even a even a web site in which you can paste your spam, and which automatically sends complaints to the correct places: Spamcop.
So, unless this forgery was done with the express purpose of annoying someone at IBM, don't make it into a criminal case; it's just business as usual.
Say no to software patents.
Juno and Hotmail have sued spammers (e.g., the "TCPS" spammer from a couple of years back) for forging their domain names into fake email addresses inserted in the From: header. The forging caused clueless people to send countless bogus abuse reports to Juno and Hotmail abuse desks, consuming their resources. IIRC, uu.net got into the act too, as most of the spams were coming from a long series of uu.net dialups in an area of NYC that didn't have caller-ID.
There's the "flowers.com case", where a spammer issued a forged HELO flowers.com when doing a spam in order to fool (ancient) versions of Sendmail into hiding the spammer's originating IP address when raping a third-party relay. $65000 in damages because it defamed the legitimate owner of flowers.com at the time.
It's trademark infringement as well. You purport that your mail comes from AOL, it's AOL's business that you're using their domain name. AOL's landsharks have been known to sue spammers for falsely implying that spam comes from AOL. More power to 'em.
Finally, in the cases of "joe jobs" - where a spammer will forge spam in the name of someone in order to target the forged party for harassment - it's obvious that there's intent to defame, harass, and of course, willful misrepresentation.
The forging of headers in unsolicited bulk email should be at the very least a civil, if not a criminal, offense.
The real problem, of course, is that since your average spammer lives in a trailer surrounded by beer cans and chicken bones, collecting anything from a spammer can be a real problem.
Which is why it's relatively rare that ISPs sue or press criminal charges against spammers. More's the pity. There's a group of spammers operating out of Earthlink dialups in a manner identical to that of the TCPS spammer's abuse of uu.net dialups a few years ago, and Earthlink is doing nothing about it. More's the pity.
But back to the original article on ABCNews:
The son of a bitch not only spammed, but he raped a relay to do it. That's theft of computer services at a minimum, and given the number of bounced spams that probably came back to the raped relay at Market Vision, probably a DOS attack too.
Throw the book at the son of a bitch and put his head on a pike. Pour encourager les autres.
On a related note, a number of my colleagues are insisting that China recently EXECUTED some spammers. Any stories/f.u. on that would be great!
I wonder if the guards yelled "JUST HIT DELETE" before shooting the offenders...