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Spammer Fined $2,000 Plus Costs in Washington
berniecase writes "The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that Jason Heckel, of Salem, OR, has been ordered (on summary judgment, no less) by King County Superior Court Judge Douglass North to pay $98,000 for sending spam to Washington state residents. Heckel's lawyers say they'll appeal on the basis that Washington's law violates the constitutional protection of interstate commerce."
"The rest of the penalty is for state's attorneys' fees and court costs."
Which adds a nice cool $96,197.74 on to it.
Joel Hodgell brought a spammer to court under Washington state's anti-spam law. Did he collect? No, his case was dismissed (the reasons aren't clear), and then the judge "imposed a $6,925 judgment against Hodgell to compensate ... the spammers' lawyer". The state law is facing inconsistent application; some judges don't think a state law can be used on out-of-state residents, others refuse to hear it in small-claims court, despite a published opinion by the state's attorney general. News.com has a story on this and other cases.
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
I know it bothers a lot of people...but I mean come on..
MIMEDefang + MCaffee (enter favorite virus scanner here) + Spamassassin makes the spam and viruses pretty much go away.
And here is a great HOWto by Mickey Hill on making it all work together.
Legislation is not going to solve this problem, and only ties up our courts/government with drivel. As many people have mentioned, how is this going to work with international spammers? It's not. Just kill the spam.
It's been a long day -- I read this and had a mental picture of a law that required all spammers to use condoms.... ;)
On a more serious note, international law isn't up to dealing with spam and spammers yet, and I don't think it will be any time soon. It can't even deal with terrorism and terrorists effectively. :/
Osirusoft is an excellent resource, but it doesn't contain anything even close to all of the available anti-spam blacklists. MAPS is pretty irrelevant these days, but don't forget the DSBL , Five-Ten-Sg , Monkeys.com , RFC-Ignorant , and Wirehub , all of which are publicly queryable and none of which are mirrored by Osirusoft.
There are a whole bunch of other blacklists out there, as well. Not all are well maintained and not all have consistent policies about which IP ranges or domains get listed and how a domain can be removed, though, so I stick to the established ones.
Catherine
There is also no way to know if a resident is from washington or not.
Yes there is. Washington State has a registry of e-mail addresses that residents can sign up for.
Registration of your Washington E-mail address on this site makes sure would-be senders have some way of finding out you own a Washington E-mail address. Your rights to take individual action under the law and the state's right to jurisdiction are protected when you register your E-mail address.
Found here...
$96000 (US) was only two-thirds of the cost, according to the article.
The problem is enforcing the judgement...
All he has to do is ignore it and they can't do anything without a prolonged legal wrangle with the courts in his state.
Assuming they work through that he'll have to pay some sort of contempt of court fine (a few grand at most) but he can dodge the rest simply by declaring bankruptcy and reopening under a different name.
SPEWS.
...
"SPEWS is a list of areas on the Internet which several system administrators, ISP postmasters, and other service providers have assembled and use to deny email and in some cases, all network traffic from.
Most spam advisory and blocking systems work after the fact. There is a time lag between the spammer setting up shop, spamming millions, and getting netblocks listed by these systems. SPEWS identifies known spammers and spam operations, listing them as soon as they start, sometimes even before they start spamming."
I'm working on setting up my own mail server just so I can implement SPEWS (and other spam-fighting tools).
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
Now consider another thing: not only do you get it for free, but the sender is spending exorbiant amounts of money on their junk mail! There's the cost of typesetting, printing, binding, and then there's the postage, which is a minimum of US$.15 per article. So let's say it is going to cost them US$.20 (20 cents) per mailer.
Take for instance the perennial Pennysaver, which is broadcast to everybody with an address. Harte-Hankes, their owner, is broadcasting this to every resident with a postal address, General Delivery addresses excepted, once per week. Now lets consider that in Anaheim, CA there are around 350,000 people covering 11-12 zip codes. In short, Harte-Hankes is spending US$70,000 per week to send a circular - that's US$3,640,300 PER YEAR in postage for the circulars alone, including the $150 fee for the permit to send bulk mail and another $150 fee for a permit to send the mail with a "postage paid" indicia on it (in lieu of a stamp or meter mark). That's in Anaheim ALONE, so you can imagine how much it costs to send these out once per week throughout the United States. It is on this kind of stuff that your mailman is making his bread and butter - you think your $.37 stamp for sending off the money to the phone company is keeping him fed?
So now that we have established that companies who spam your snail mail box spend exorbiant amounts of money in merely dropping this stuff at the post office, let's consider how much a spammer spends on his spam run:
$19.95 per month for his internet connection on a reputable ISP
$300 for a mass-mailing package if he gets one from another spammer
$600 on a decent computer with the latest greatest Windoze version
So this guy made a one-time go of $900, and if he is lucky he'll spend a total of $39.90 because his ISP overlooks him for a month. (Or worse, he has a contract that exempts him from the TOS rules and is perpetually on until somebody sues his ass blue.)
So this guy is making a trivial investment and gets to distribute the cost of his stupidity over the entire 'net.
More information can be found on the United States Postal Service website, and postage rates for US Domestic mail can be reviewed by looking at a PDF of USPS Notice 123 (WARNING: PDF LINK).
This sig no verb.
<G>
Anyone who has lived in a cave for the last two years and isn't aware of the Advance Fee Fraud scheme, which is run out of Nigeria, most other west African countries south of the Sahara, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, and the Netherlands as of the last time I checked my spamtrap, should check out the following URLs:
Believe it or not, there have been billions lost to this scam, from people who should have been smarter. (And less greedy.)
Catherine
>>could not find any indication on google or usenet that he.net is spam-friendly.
That's funny, i did a google search on "he.net -repost: group:news.admin.net-abuse.email from May. 12, 2002 to today"
And got 277 results. Some off topic, but most showing that he.net *knowingly* hosts spammers, (and does not act on complaints.)