Slashdot Mirror
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.
What about international spammers? Is there any way to stop them?
Spam isn't interstate commerce, it's interstate harassment...
Spam has never helped me in a monetairy way, and for me has nothing to do with products whatsoever...
$98000 - $2000 = $96000
That means the lawyers cost $96000.... $96000.... 96000 M.F. Dollars!
Ok, that does it, I'm sending in my application to Yale right now!!!
Hopefully this will deter future spammers.
... Then lost it :)
The guy only made like 600 bucks.
http://www.angryburrito.com/ The best, completely unfinished software review site ever.
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!
He shouldn't have any problem paying the fine.
After all, he got rich on the Internet and you can too.
Hmm, let's see, world government with unprecedented powers or wasting a couple minutes a day deleting email out of my box.
Hard choice.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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)
mandated by the WTO, to prevent spammers from breeding.
Yeah, we need an unaccountable, basically secret organisation of corrupt career beurecrats to have the power to fine people for sending messages out that someone doesn't want to recieve. What a wonderful plan! I'm sure their abuses of authority will be central to any calls to overthrow all world government via armed struggle over the course of the next century - since peaceful progress is for pussies, I support this plan wholeheartedly. Also, we should give the WTO the authority to try and execute journalists and peace corps volunteers.
How's about this - everyone sign an anti-spam treaty, and then make it enforceable in the courts with local jurisdiction over the spammer, regardless of were the spam went. The WTO would be guaranteed to clamp down on any spammer that wasn't part of their clique, so you miss something in enforcement, but at the very least you have a direct guarantee (which ought to be explicit in the treaty) that this power won't be used to stifle public participation or the like.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
They were right after all - you can make money from spam!
Reliable, Great Value Hosting: $7.95/mo 2.4G/120G
So I wonder how much Bernard Shifman Would have to cough up.....
Meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow meow...
Henkel's lawyers say they'll appeal on the basis that Washington's law violates the constitutional protection of interstate commerce."
Nobody is stopping him from interstate commerce in Washington state, he just cant be deceptive. Oh the horror.
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
Won't someone think of the Nigerians!
| - | - |
You may think it's silly, but it's the law. All law is location-based... think about it! By your logic, you couldn't prosecute someone for transmitting child porn because he can't be sure of the location of the recipient (whether that should be prosecuted or not is another question, and one that I won't debate here; it's clear that it can be prosecuted, which is what counts).
If there's a risk of breaking the law, the onus is on the perpetrator to ensure that he's sending his stuff only to places that he's allowed to send it. The fact that it's hard to do that isn't the law's problem... maybe that'll give the spammers a little less incentive to spam in the first place.
--Larry
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence
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
There are good ways to slow them down considerably right now -- spam filters, blacklists, etc. These have made it significantly harder for spammers to get their email to their targets/victims, and reduced abysmally low response rates even further.
However, stopping spammers or any other kind of criminal entirely isn't possible. Despite the clear laws and effective enforcement, people still kill other people, steal their property, etc. What the laws and enforcement do is make it dangerous to commit crimes, and deter most people who might otherwise do so.
Before you can deter a spammer in, say, China, you've got to think of a way to make him/her think that spamming is too dangerous and not worth the trouble. That depends on, not just new laws, but a very different international legal environment. (That, or convincing the Chinese government that all spammers are members of Falun Gong.) <wry grin>
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.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Too bad he cannot pay the fine.
The only guys who actually increased their male package size by 300% are the dudes who are going to [beep] him in jail.
Table-ized A.I.
The law has always upheld the notion that I cannot do business, international, interstate or otherwise through misrepresenting myself.
If I am misrepresenting myself through name, address or other contact information, there are many who say this would amount to fraud and deception.
The anit-spam law does nothing more than spell out the forms of fraud and deception that are not permissible and identifies the consequences of those acts. Fraud and deception in business has always been immoral and almost always been unlawful. Like so many other laws written in the past 8 years, there isn't anything really new about them -- they merely attempt to clear up the "grey areas" associated with using newer technologies to perpetrate old crime.
That said, I hate the DMCA and all it stands for -- they go too far. But just as I have said, this is nothing new -- Copyright violation is really nothing new -- it was illegal before and it's illegal now.
Now maybe my support of anti-spam and my position against the DMCA might seem contradictory except for my view on what law is for. Law should protect the rights of all the people. When it starts to protect or create the rights of a minority at the expense of the rights of the whole population, there is a serious problem with the philosophy of law. Anti-spam law protects the rights of the whole population. The DMCA creates new rights [powers?] for a minority at the expense of our rights to fair use and criminalizes the whole nation for trivial and common acts of the public.
If your state doesn't currently have anti-spam law, write a letter to your law makers about it. It takes about as much time and effort as writing an email... in many cases, it's the same effort -- send them an email!! Anti-spam is something the whole city, state and country can get behind and might be a really cool [modern] 'issue' to talk about while campaigning for re-election. Use your voter's leverage to get things done. That's ultimately what "campaign contributions" are allegedly for anyway... money to use to get you to vote for them. Just tell them you won't vote for them unless you get the kind of law you are interested in. After that, no amount of campaign contributions would help them get re-elected... then the gravy train is over for them.
You're reading this... you're taking lots of time you could be spending writing to your law makers... are you still here? You're still reading this aren't you. You lazy-ass! Complacant cow. Say something! Do something and quit complaining that there's nothing you can do when you can. If you've already done it, do it again... are you still reading? Why? Crap...
When some people discover the truth, they just can't understand why everybody isn't eager to hear it.
Let's say he sends 100k spam e-mails a week, every week, for one year. He gets .004% of the people he mails to pay $40 for a pamphlet.
So he gets 40 people, a week to buy a pamphlet. That is $1,600 a week.
That is $89,600 a year
If he woulda just paid the $2,000 he would have made a dandy profit.
Found here...
- No, and here's why. I dont have to pay anything to recieve junk snail mail.
Whilst that's accurate, its not the whole story. Last time I checked, garbage collection was not free. So yes, it does cost me money.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!
1. Spam hundreds of thousands of people. 2. Pay $100,000 3. Profit????
Here in the USA, I suffer with both.
That whole spam thing was getting out of hand. Good thing it's finally over!
Madhouse: Satirized for your protection
*Splort*
Now consider another thing: not only do you get it for free, but the sender is spending exorbiant amounts of money on their junk mail! There's the cost of typesetting, printing, binding, and then there's the postage, which is a minimum of US$.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.
As much as I hate spam, I don't think laws against it will help. Most spam is already illegal because it is fraudulent or because it was sent by illegally(?) breaking into a private mail server to do the mail relaying. I think the real solutions are technical and social:
As a side note (rant), I personally believe that it is wrong to for companies that we do business with to send marketing materials via email unless you specifically ask. Sometimes I want product announcements from a company, so I will sign up for such lists. But such lists should be opt-in (not opt-out). Web forms that require you to register and have a "add to mailing list" checkbox should have that option *disabled* by default.
As for why email spam is worse than snail mail spam, there are two simple answers: 1. Email is (almost) free to send, and therefore the bulk if junk email is much greater. 2. The way email is used is very different. If you have your email client alert you while you are working to tell you that you have a message, and that message is spam, your work was interrupted for nothing. This does not apply to snail mail. [This is also why I think telemarketers are even worse than spammers -- they are more intrusive.)
Ad banners don't even get clicked on 0.4%, what makes you think spammers will get BUYS that high? I'd say it's more like 0.001%. But since the cost is almost zilch for them they make up for the low percentage by mass mailing millions of accounts.
eTrade SUCKS
In a way, we're already doing this (well, not the nuclear weapons).
Specifically, legitimate Internet users in China and other Asian nations are finding it harder and harder to send legitimate e-mails to Western-based ISPs which have blacklisted them. Boom, automatic international sanctions, from the ground up.
As a result, they are going to start increasing pressure on their governments to deal with the problem. And if there's one nice thing about an authoritarian government, it's that they are very good at dealing with "problems". We fine someone $2000, they use the gulag... hmmm.. spammers in the gulag. That I'd like to see.
We fine someone $2000, they use the gulag... hmmm.. spammers in the gulag. That I'd like to see.
Perhaps we could petition them to set up webcams. I'd pay to see it.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
MIMEDefang is the most annoying useless piece of crap that has ever been forced on end users. I don't use outlook, and I don't need to be protected from windows viruses. I *DO* want MIME to work as intended. When my system administrator imposed MIMEDefiang on us at work I promptly wrote a procmail filter and perl script to UNDefang the mime headers. It's just an inconvienience, and it doesn't accomplish anything. The people who are smart enough to figure out how to turn it off are smart enough to avoid getting viruses. Everybody else is going to save the file and rename it and get the virus anyway. You're going to have to teach them how to do this so they can still read word documents that are sent to them as attachments.
Education is the answer. Breaking MIME should be a criminal offense.
Perhaps we could petition them to set up webcams. I'd pay to see it.
No! No no no no no! Don't give the Chinese spammers any more ideas!!!
Hello and Greetings! You like see evil spammer in gulag? Watch hot inmates get advantage of evil spammer in shower! Just click here for hot, gulag shower webcam!
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.