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Beating the Spam Merchants
Crowbraid writes: "Well-written column by Margie Boule from the Portland Oregonian about an individual who got tired of getting spam,
sued the company for $25 an email, and won." See also Bennett Haselton's anti-spam page, where he has details on "pursuing the anti-spam lawsuits on four separate fronts." (Those lawsuits were mentioned a few months back.)
Oh my god, I'd better call my lawyer... I may already be a millionaire!
The speed of time is one second per second.
In many cases, spam coming from a Chinese ISP really originates in the US, and is being bounced off of an open email relay.
"I e-mailed back, saying 'Take me off your subscription list. I don't want this.' " And then Harold put a little bite in his request. "I wrote, 'I will charge you $25 per message as a reading fee,' " for every subsequent e-mail.
;-)
:: Worth Every Red Cent!
Harold says the fee was not just a threat; it was a reasonable charge for time and equipment. "I have to download the message, to find out it's junk and delete it. If you're using my download time, you are in effect using my services. During that time I can't use my computer, which is essential in my business."
OK, so apparently this dude thinks he's worth:
($25.00 / 2 seconds to download and identify a message) * (60 seconds / 1 minute) * (60 minutes / 1 hour) = $45,000.00 / hour.
Hell, I'll even subtract $1.00 (I'm rounding up mind you) for bandwidth and computing costs to handle the huge 2KB spams.
So, he thinks he's valued at $44,999.00 / hour. Much better.
Must be a really smart guy
m o n o l i n u x
It is the small persons equalizer for corprate greed. Basically you can force a large company to show up and spend money on their lawyers, while you just show up and tell the judge what happened.
Used it twice, one time my bank was cashing my car payment checks, but not crediting my loan... Needless to say when they threatened to take my car away, I filled suit. Long story short, they paid up rather than spend the money on lawyers (which they would have lost anyway)
The other time it was my wifes employer not doing the right things with her termination... Got the district manager and ourselves infront of a mediator and a deal was struck...
You won't get rich with small claims court (I think it only covers up to 1,500 maybe 2,500) but it is very simple to file and win a reasonable case
The fundamental change that the Internet introduced was the economic fact that sending n pieces of email took the same effort as sending 1. The fact that this essentially puts the cost (storage, bandwidth, attention, etc) onto the recipient distorts the incentive for posting which consequently leads to spam. This is the old story of privatise the benefits and socialise the losses.
... if the email wasn't worth their time, then they would "charge" the sender a small amount. If the free market worked, then advertisers would figure out the cost of your attention (especially if they lumped their mistakes) and be more selective in their branding activities (as well as reduce visual pollution). However, because the consumer doesn't have any expectation of privacy, much less opinion as to their preferences, B2C cheerfully ignore these minor details in their belief that buying xxx will solve your worries.
The book EarthWeb (see http://www.baen.com/blurbs/067157809X.htm, http://www.the-earthweb.com/) had a good idea in that people could set a threshold
Marketing is a necessary evil but the economic costs should be bourne by the originators (whoch have control over quantity) rather than the public at large. How much do you value your attention (and thus time)?
LL
Better yet, send out an e-mail to everyone telling them about this great money-making opportunity!
And I don't put my e-mail in public places where spammers would look to pick it up. As far as I'm concerned if you get spammed, it's your fault.
I find it important that people reading my website can respond back to me. I don't see why me providing an email address so they can respond makes me at fault for getting spammed, any more than leaving a car in a parking lot while I shop makes me at fault for it getting stolen.
Beating the Spam Merchants
Good, you find the Spam Merchants and I'll find my bat!!
I stole this Sig
but all this Spam news is making me hungry.
Spam Nachos anyone??
I did a little bit of research last week on Spam laws in my home state (Tennessee) According to Tennessee Spam laws, if a company based in Tennessee spams you after you have requested they remove your name, you can sue them for up to $5000 per day they continue to spam them. I found out about this law at SueSpammers.org.
Incidentally, I have a spamcop IMAP e-mail account that filters out potential spam. There was one guy from Canada that kept spamming me over and over. I noticed that the unsubscribe link (which I had tried twice) pointed to a top level domain. Using Internic's WHOIS, I got the jerk's home address, phone number, and e-mail address. Luckily in this case it wasn't forged. After personally contacting him (and threatening legal action), I have gotten no spam from his "company" in 1 week. (Funny thing is, Canada has no anti-spam laws... it was all BSing)
I love stories like this where the individual triumphs over evil.
;-)
In the State of Washington you can sue for up to $250.00 per spam. Spam is defined as unrequested commercial bulk email that has either a misleading subject line and/or invalid return address.
The real problem with trying to collect is that most spammers make it VERY difficult to trace the email back. They may bounce it off of an open relay or use stolen accounts and they almost always use a false return address.
You can usually find the domain that the email came from by looking at the header information but if they bounced it off of an open relay in China it may not do you any good.
Really, the only ones that you should try to go after should be the ones that are stupid enough to provide you with real information in the body of the letter that will allow you to track them down.
Most of the time the spammer wants one thing: Your money. So he may give an 800 number or a web page URL. If you can convince him that you need his real address to send him money the may provided it and you can send him a subpoena instead.
Some spammers will try to get your credit card number. Once they have it you may find yourself the unwilling donator of a brand new laptop or some other piece of property that the spammer can sell on the black market.
Never, never, never, give a spammer your credit card number.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Shouldn't take long.
-------------------------------------------------
This man doesn't qualify for hero status. He basically threatened the company with a lawsuit and accepted a little money to go away and not tell anyone about the company's practices (or at least without the company's name).
When people settle cases, they may get some money and self-satisfaction, but it does very little good for anyone else. When a case is tried in court and a verdict is rendered, a legal precedent is set by which future actions are governed. This is the only truly effective way of fighting the onslaught of spam email in the long run.
Even if you manage to get a huge settlement and put a company out of business, the way is still paved for 5 more companies to pop up and take its place. And in this case, it sounds like the company is absolutely free to continue its practices as it has in the past. Where's the good angle to this story?
Such as web archives of mailing lists for opensource projects? It must be nice to sit there handing out advice and calling people idiots when you never contribute to the community.
Most of the spam I get is at an address harvested from mailing list archives for GCC, Doxygen, and few other much smaller projects. Does that mean I'm an idiot? If you think so, perhaps you shouldn't be using these programs (after all, an idiot has contributed to them).
Does that mean I'm going to stop sending mail to a public mailing list? No, because as much as I'd like to reduce the amount of spam I get, I'd much rather see improved software.
Suing spammers is being an idiot? Huh?
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Giving a proper email address in a public forum is like posting your phone number on a billboard in times square, and then expecting nobody you don't want to call!
Posting my phone number on a billboard in times square should be like posting my email on a billboard in time square, not like posting my email on a few limited-interest mailing lists and web pages.
I don't expect that my email will be limited to those I particularly want to talk to. I do expect that it will be reasonable human beings with an interest in communicating with me. Fradulently titled commercial email that I get 7 copies of (3 email aliases and 4 mailing lists that I'm on) don't count.
I don't have an option to hide my email address, either. Besides my webpage, I'm a Debian maintainer (creating several publicly known aliases) and a contributer to several email lists with public archives.
In fact, Apreche is a CS student at Rochester, and has this little website.
The very first link on the home page is News Archive, that leads to a non-existant page. The university's server generates a much-nicer-than-usual 404 error page, which includes among other info Apreche's email address, specifically "slr2777@osfmail.rit.edu" (which wouldn't have been very difficult to guess based on the user-style url for his site).
Also on each interior page is a mailto: link to "apreche@mail.rit.edu", preceeded with the text "Clik here to e-mail me".
Apreche, you really should fix that link... but when someone types http://www.rit.edu/~slr2777/somerandomename, they're gonna see your email address. At least it won't be due to a broken link on your own home page!
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
As far as I'm concerned if you get spammed, it's your fault.
My house is sited behind 48 inches of reinforced concrete. I have machine-gun pillboxes sited on each corner, each manned 24 hrs a dat. My house never gets burglarized. If you don't do the same and you do get burglarized, it's your fault.
Sheesh!
Need I say more?
Cheers!
I laugh at your pitiful lies! Your story cannot be true! It's absurd! Everyone knows spammers don't have souls...
;-)
DennyK