California Sues Spammer for $2 Million

KilroyTheVeg writes "The Mercury News reports that the California Attorney General, Bill Lockyer, filed suit against Internet marketer PW Marketing LLC, accusing the company of illegally spamming millions of Californians. The Story is here and the Sidney Morning Herald also has the story here. The suit named PW Marketing LLC (note:subpoena in link is third one down the page) and its owners Paul Willis and Claudia Griffins defendants in the suit which seeks "at least" $US2 million from them for allegedly flouting several state consumer protection laws banning spam mail. All I can say is Make 'em pay, it's the only way to hurt 'em where it counts." Update: 09/30 22:02 GMT by T : Note, that's Sydney Morning Herald.

Comments

Don't hold your breath

[Lamont]

I live in California and think this is great, but I'm also realistic enough to know that this will be stuck in the courts for years....

Re:How sad.

[schon]

All the poor guy did was spam

Just because he only steals a couple of cents from a million people, doesn't mean it's not theft.

What if we arrested multiple mailers to real mailboxes?

Well, if they forged stamps in an attempt to send millions envelopes, I'm sure you would.

Re:one of a million

[Marx_Mrvelous]

You don't have to prosecute EVERY spammer to stop, or even slow, spam. Right now a lot of legitimate (as in, not illegal) businesses buy and sell e-mail addresses and send Spam. I would bet that a high majority (over 90%) comes from the same small group of companies.

So if one of the say, 10 companies gets sued for $2,000,000 and put out of business, don't you think that the other 9 will start looknig elsewhere?

And even if my 90% weren't true, and ALL spam is from random people, prosecuting one will still put the "fear of God" in them and many will think twice before sending any spam.

I'm a big proponent of making Spam illegal, and prosecuting spammers. I believe that it will cut down Spam significantly.

Re:one of a million

[Bilbo]

> However, its one spammer, in one state, in one country

It's called legal precedent. In other words, once you've gone through the pain and hassle of pushing one of these through court, then it makes it a whole lot easier to get the next one.

As to the "just one," I admit I haven't read the article on this one, but remember that these are usually SPAM services that put these things out. In other words, this isn't just one message we're talking about, but potentially thousands of "clients", each one with hundreds of thousands of individual emails to users in California. Sure, knock one out and a hundred more jump in to fill the gap, but if you can prove that it will cost you money to spam CA residents, then people will start thinking twice about all those get rich quick messages. A lot of other states are watching this case, and if CA can make it stick, there will be other states to follow.

Re:Oh yes...publicity always cripples businesses

[ClamBoy]

The only way that spammers will stop sending you email is when people stop complaining about it (because that means it's working) and stop replying to it or responding to it in any way. Much like a 5 year old child, the only way to shut them up, IMO, is to just ignore them. Pretend they don't exist. Stop spam locally, ignore spam globally.

The part you neglect to mention is the escalation of the undesirable behaviour before you get the desirable behaviour. Even if it would work, things would get a whole lot worse before they ever got better.

cb

Re:How sad.

[Silent_E]

"All the poor guy did was spam!"
"What if we arrested multiple mailers to real mailboxes?"

Spam is totally different from mailers. It is free to take the time to empty my snail mailbox, but spamers can send files to my e-mail that I have to pay to download. This is why spam and fax spam is wrong: they both pass on unrequested costs to the receiver, and for stuff I didn't ask for!! I recently got some java-scripted spam that was over 5M! That is totally unacceptable.

Lawsuits working in conjunction with laws banning spam seem like the best legal (as in not illegal, NPI) way to teach folks that spaming is not a money-making business.

The Bunco Squad approach; Call Joe Friday!

[swb]

This has been my position all along. There's a lot of obstacles to going after unsolicited commercial email. The Direct Marketing Association quickly gets involved, since overly harsh penalties can excessively punish people that want to direct market to known consumers but screw up somehow. They have lobbying ability and tend to stifle legilslative debate.

And then there's the entire problem of *enforcement*. If I'm running a bulk emailing operation out of my basement and its now illegal, why don't I just rent a couple of systems in some foreign country where its not illegal that doesn't bother with a lot of American laws?

I'm far more convinced that if you put the effort into enforcing the current anti-fraud laws *now* on the books it would decimate the business that spammers need to stay spamming. The problem isn't UCE, the problem is fraud is going on unchecked on a massive scale and no one seems interested in stopping it.

Re:one of a million

[schon]

is a cutting down of spam volume worth the general erosion of freedom and enforcement dollars that it will cost

Enforcement dollars perhaps, but there is no "erosion of freedom" associated with banning spam.

Every single bit of freedom that could possibly be "lost" was gone long ago, when other types of theft were made illegal.

Re:Spammers have every right to exist

[schon]

Government has no right interfering in the business activities of spammers.

How about

"Government has no right interfering in the business activities of mafia."

Theft is illegal. Spam is theft.

Government has every right to "interefere" with such "business" activities.

Re:The Al Capone Approach

[GGardner]

E.g., get insurance from us... we guarantee we can beat any other offer because we'll sell you a policy but be long gone when you make a claim

Exactly! Insurance fraud, unlike spam, is clearly illegal, and there is already legal infrastructure to deal with it. We should just apply existing law and go after these people now, without waiting for new laws, or getting tied up in court trying to deal with new laws.

Re:slogan

[El]

Actually, I think Libertarians beleive that one of the few valid functions of government is to enforce truth in advertising and truth in labeling, thus allowing consumers to make their own informed choices. Last time I checked, 90% of the SPAM I received was blatently lying about who it was from and lying about the subject to get my attention. This is and should be illegal, and I think even most Libertarians would agree. The basic principle is "You're freedom to swing you fist ends where my nose begins." SPAMMERS are wasting my time and money without my permission (not by force or coercion, but rather by deceit), thus they are effectively connecting with my nose, and their freedom should be limited.

Extra-territorial

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with California going after spammers in Sydney is the reverse of the problem with, say, France or China going after US companies that are violating their laws against say Nazi related items or free-speech related pages in China. The extra-territorial nature of this is

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't like spam either, but what is sauce for the goose (California going after companies in Australia) WILL BE sauce for the gander (France going after Google, Chine going after others etc).

This brings up other questions too:
1. If online gambling is illegal in your jurisdiction, can you stop it where it is based?
2. Suppose you have a data haven off the coast of Britain...

What California, China, France and Italy (among many others) are trying to do is to export their laws by extending their jurisdiction extra-territorially. Instead of a free Internet, you have an Internet governed by the most restrictive laws instead of the least. This is a bad thing for freedom on the net.

For example see:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/10/0450 20 3&mode=thread&tid=153 (italian police censor blasphemous websites)
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid= 02/07/15/18 37255&mode=thread&tid=153 (Yahoo censoring portal)
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02 /07/17/16 17225&mode=thread&tid=158 (Crypto restrictions - well it is illegal in Iraq, Britain, so you must block it in the US).

Etc...
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=0 2/09/02/02 46224&mode=thread&tid=153
http://yro.slashdot.org /article.pl?sid=02/09/12/13 27238&mode=thread&tid=153

If you just type in "France censor" you can find a ton on here.

Re:one of a million

[mkldev]

Two million dollars for a major spammer isn't disproportionate. First, assume that it costs the average person twenty seconds of time to decide if something is spam, 30 seconds to download a large html file with lots of pictures, etc. over a 56k modem, and you're at nearly a minute of lost work per message. At an engineer's salary, that's fifty cents of wasted time _PER MESSAGE_. Assume the spammer sent out ten million messages (not unreasonable). That's five million dollars worth of damage. If you ask me, they're getting off easy. Really easy.