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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.
$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!!!
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.
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!
| - | - |
Exactly correct--the spam you receive seems to originate overseas. Actually, much of it is coming from hucksters in North America. They're just bouncing their pitches off open relays overseas.
~Idarubicin
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
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.".
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.
Found here...
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!
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.
Not that I agree with spammers or their methods, but speech is speech, whether you like it or not is irrelevant.
Many spammers argue that free speech constitutes that banning spamming is a violation of protected free speech.
This is a straw argument to avoid the real issue.
First, commercial speech is not protected by the US constition in the way free speech by US citizens is.
Second, wether I like it or not is relevant.
The right to free speech means that the government or its officials cannot forbid citizens the freedom of expression.
It does not mean, however, that citizen A has to listen to another citizen B's speech forced upon him. Free speech also does not mean that citizen A has to allow citizen B to talk freely on A's property.
As a cinema owner, I can expell a weirdo who stands up in the middle of the film and reads from the communist manifesto. As a newspaper editor, I can decide which letter the paper publishes and which not. As an internet provider, I can decide if my mail servers filter spam or not.
And finally, the very method of spamming is illegal over here in Germany and I have successfully brought a spammer to court here (although with very little financial consequences for the spammer). It's good to see that US courts are seing the light, as well.
------------------
You may like my a cappella music
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!!!
IANAL
If you buy, rent, lease, or contract for a service, it's chattel. If it's chattel, it's property.
If you rent a car from Avis, and while you are parked in the parking lot for Home Depot, and I put a lock on your car so you can't drive it, then I'm commiting a tortious interfearance with your contract with Avis, and depriving you of the use of something you paid for.
Even if I unlock it before you come out, it's actionable, because you MIGHT use it and you paid for it.
If I put a govenor on your rental car to keep you from going over 25 MPH, still a problem. I'm keeping you from using your rental car the way you leased it.
When you "buy" internet access, you are buying a service from someone. If I send you spam, you can't use that bandwidth while I'm sending. When I send you spam, it takes space in your mail box, depriving you of the use of that space. When you download your mail, I'm using space on your system to store spam, space you can't use for anything else until it's deleted.
As you can see, every phase of sending spam once it hits your ISP is depriving you of something you paid to use, never agreed to let me use, and is stolen every time I send you spam.
I've seen spammers try to use this arguement, and they get shot down pretty quickly.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.