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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."
UCE is bad enough alone, but this jerk was sending spam with bad return addresses and deceptive subject lines. I mean, commercial email with subjects "Did I get the right email address?" to trick the user into opening it? That's just scummy.
Obviously, this guy got the _wrong_ email address. Go Washington!
The basic problem with the decision is that it's simply not punitive enough.
Let's face it: The amount of people that can see a message when sent via e-mail is a hell of a lot more than any advertiser could hope for via any other medium. And a $100K judgement, I believe, isn't enough incentive to stop anyone from spamming.
Besides, the real problem with spam tends to lie overseas, out of the reach of the US justice system. Most of the spam I receive day in, day out seems to originate from the Orient--China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, etc.
While I applaud the decision here at home, I wonder what sort of effect it will ultimately have on curbing the spam problem. Sadly, I don't think it's going to make even the smallest of dents.
My $.02, anyway...
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
I've had a bunch of spammers faking their headers so that it looks like the spam is coming from my website. This pissed me off, so I tracked them down until I found that one of the losers lived in Ohio. Since I live in Washington, I looked up the law to see how much money I could make off the guy. Unfortunately, an individual can only sue for $500. Considering the amount of effort I was going to have to put into the case, I decided not to sue (just sent a letter telling him that I could) because I could easily make over $500 in the time I would spend on the case. If I were an ISP or served my own mail, I would have gone after him because ISPs/hardware-types can sue for around $1000.
:(
So yeah, you can make money, but the only way to actually make good money would be if you were an ISP (because you could sue every US spammer that sent email to a user). Individuals like me are better off getting a job
One of the ways to combat spam is to educate businesses who become interested in using spam. One of our clients came to us with a proposal to increase traffic to their website. They discovered that you could "send thousand's of emails for just pennies" (yes, that's a quote from a spammer's ad they read back to us).
We tried to explain how this doesn't really help generate traffic, and how it generates bad will, and how some states now have laws against unsolicited email.
The final kicker was to have the following conversation with the company founder.
Me: "How often do you get spam email?"
Him: "All the time."
Me: "Do you read any of it?"
Him: "No."
[awkward 15 second silence]
Him: "I get it.".
Most people end up making this a free speech thing, all spammers do is a little e-mailing, that granted we don't want, but that's it. This is not the case, many spammers are involved in hacking. Using this to anonymize themselves and harvest more victims. Check out the Honeynet Project's SOTM 22 here. The attacker was a spammer who was using a compromised system to run an e-mail harvester that targeted ICQ users.