Prosecuting A Spam Artist

ronmon writes: "DSLReports has discovered evidence of a creative Spammer / Data Miner who has managed to glean email addresses from their member's information pages. Apparently someone has gotten around to writing a script that decodes obfuscated addresses like imasobATspam_centralDOTcom, which was only a matter of time. Server logs show well over half a million requests from several IPs in a specific block and they have been advised that they are in a good postion to prosecute. They're asking for legal help, so any of you good hearted lawyers out there looking to boost your karma, here's your chance :)"

Comments

Re:A suggested solution

[mosch]

That's a great way to make your site less accessible to people with disabilities. You've succesfully made it so people with visual disabilities cannot get your email address.

Your solution breaks the web even more than it's already broken, as a blind person, I find your idea contemptable.

Re:You know, I don't think spam is all bad.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes, you get something through the snail mail that actually interests you. Occasionally those carefully targetted advertizing campaigns actually hit the mark.

No, I don't, and no, they NEVER hit the mark where I am concerned. In fact, I proactively boycott companies that violate my privacy to send me advertising, and I proactively do what I can to do monetary damage to them. If a company buys or sells or harvests information about me for the purposes of sending me unwanted, unsolicited advertising, I will make them pay for it.

Now I am not trying to apologize for irresponsible spammers, but you have to admit, some spam is actually interesting. I am talking about the mailings from corporations whose product you have bought in the past, and who you might be interested in dealing with again.

You are dead wrong. When I buy from a corporation, I explicitely tell them not to attempt to advertise to me in the future. I do NOT want to hear from them. If I have any interest in purchasing anything from them in the future, I will do so of my own volition. If they attempt to pressure me to purchase from them my making any attempt to send targetted advertising to me, they win an instant enemy, and virtually guarantee that neither I, nor anyone that looks to me for product recommendations will purchase from them again.

So before jumping on the spam==bad bandwagon, stop for a minute and think. Is it really bad ? Or are you just being a bit of a whiner...

You are absolutely right about stopping and thinking. Let's stop for a minute and think:

• Unsolicited bulk email shifts the costs of advertising from the advertiser to the recipient. The recipient or the recipient's ISP has to pay to receive the unsolicited, unwanted garbage email.
• Unsolicited bulk email is almost always theft of service. The operators of the mail relays that are hijacked to send the junk almost never give their permission to have their equipment and bandwidth resources stolen. So, spammers are resource thieves.
• The bandwidth and admin costs of dealing with unsolicited unwanted junk email are high, jacking up the costs of Internet service for people everywhere.
• Unsolicited bulk email can deluge an email account to the point where it's useless. My email account at my DSL provider is unusable because it gets a fifty to one ratio of spam to legitimate email. I had to filter everything except emails originating from the ISP itself. Fortunately, I run my own sendmail server and can generate as many email addresses as I need. Spammers poke at it and probe it attempting to hijack it as a spam relay several times a day.

So, after thinking about it, I can conclusively say that yes, spam is bad. Spammers should be prosecuted. Personally, I'd like to see criminal charges be applicable.

Cheers!