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MonsterHut Jammed for Spam
DeAshcroft writes "Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Lottie E. Wilkins has ordered MonsterHut, its CEO Todd Pelow and CTO Gary Hartl to stop behaving badly. The New York Post has a story on the ruling. The suit, brought by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer in May 2002, alleges that MonsterHut sent over 500 million messages, fraudulently claiming that they were opt-in, and ignored at least 750,000 requests by consumers to be taken off their lists. Newsday also has coverage. The AG has an official release on the case. Penalty hearing is scheduled for Feb 11, 2003."
While the parent post is quite funny, I would seriously recommend that no one actually take this route to cut down on spam. It is very possible that such a reply could get someone/someone's family killed. In China, it isn't like it is in the West... there may not be an opportunity to refute such charges before an impartial court. Couple a technically illiterate local government agency with the language barrier, and you could make some awful big trouble for a (relatively to the crime) innocent person.
sm
Spammers need a point of contact to collect the loot from the suckers, and as a practical matter that needs to be domestic (international postage and currency conversion would eat the profits, unless you pull off something like the Nigerian scam where the sucker loses a lot of money). If the spam operation is illegal, the authorities can close down the money contact point.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Yes, it validates your email address. So does the fact that the spam didn't bounce.
No, not quite. The mail not bouncing validates the address; it does *not* prove that anyone's actually reading the mail. Clicking the link proves not only that the address is valid, but that someone read the mail, too.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Spam is theft.
They are stealing bandwidth. You may pay a fixed rate per month, but your ISP has to pay for extra load on their lines by having more powerful servers, more diskspace. These costs get passed to you.
They steal your time. If you don't care about stopping these thieves, you can just hit delete. How much time does that take? What if you never had to receive the crap in the first place? If you want to track them down (as you *know* that they're stealing from you), that takes even more time.
I can remember when getting an email meant that one of my friends or family wanted to communicate. Spammers have stolen that feeling from me. Now, when I get an email, I have to worry about whether I can open that email in the office, whether I'm going to be pissed off about someone intruding on my work with their marketing crap.
Spammers are thieves. Lowlife, scum-sucking thieves. They are taking advantage of a system built on everyone behaving responsibly and polluting it for everyone. They are greedy, self-centred and short-sighted. They are destroying a means of communication which had so much promise. Email is rapidly becoming worthless thanks to spammers. Thay have taken that from us. It didn't belong to them, it belonged to all of us, but they took it anyway and abused it until it was useless. It is the Tragedy of the Commons writ large.
dave
Good point, but there's also a good answer. The answer is that all spammers are not alike.
Some spammers undoubtedly will move offshore, if they haven't already. Spammers of illegal or otherwise questionable products -- stuff like travel scams, herbal "Viagra", Make*Money*Fast pyramid schemes, 419 Advance Fee Frauds, stock manipulation stuff, and the like -- are the 21st century equivalents of the 20th century boiler room telemarketers. The laws never could do much about them.
But many spammers have established businesses and customers in this country. Businesses like Verisign/Network Solutions, Encyclopedia Britannica, Citibank, Barnes & Noble, and Real Networks (makers of the RealPlayer) have all spammed repeatedly. Some of these have done their own spamming; others have paid "legitimate" marketing companies to spam on their behalf. In either case, they are legally responsible, at least in the United States, because in the U.S. companies are responsible for what their agents do. And, just like laws against abusive telemarketing practices have stopped legitimate companies from doing abusive stuff, laws against spamming would stop legitimate companies.
The moral is that laws won't stop an outright crook, or a crooked company that appears one day and disappears the next. However, they DEFINITELY affect the behavior of companies that have established products, established places of business, an established customer base, and a reputation to loose.
So I'm all for using the laws against spammers. Just don't abandon blacklists, filtering, and other tools. :)
Catherine