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."

Comments

How long

[tmark]

Before all these spam companies just move off-shore to avoid litigation ?

Re:How long

[PhxBlue]

A better question is, would it do them any good to move offshore? Skylarov (sp?) lived in Russia, and the American government still managed to yank him into their "justice" system.

Re:How long

[Zeinfeld]

Before all these spam companies just move off-shore to avoid litigation ?

Have you been to Grand Cayman? Would you want to actually live there?

Moving the data center operations of a spamhaus offshore does not prevent prosecutors charging owners living in the US. If the criminal activity takes place in the US they can prosecute in the US.

It is quite likely that the offshore havens can and will prosecute also. Hosting SPAM senders does not bring anywhere near the amount of revenue that the traditional offshore industries of banking and shipping do. Any country that is in the offshore game is anxious to ensure that it does not draw unwanted attention to its current scams by allowing high profile criminal activity. You don't get much more high profile than businesses that anoy millions of people an hour.

Offshore havens are not by and large lawless, in fact the cayman islands sells itself on the fact that as a result of its British administration it has a government and banking system that have very high integrity. Cayman is not going to do anything to threaten that reputation and its existing business. So that leaves the spam senders with places like Congo, Nigeria and Afghanistan where the civil government has collapsed (though few 'libertarians' seem to want to live inthose countries).

Moving data centers offshore is in any case a high cost and would be a significant barrier to entry for new spam senders. If you have to move to a jurisdiction where the civil government is corrupt costs are going to rapidly spiral out of control.

The 'regulatory arbitrage' stuff is all about ideological commitment rather than analysis.

Ironic

[jyuter]

That Monsterhut.com lists links to spam filters.

A Swing in the right direction

[FortKnox]

Many states are implementing no-call(/spam) lists, spammers are getting nailed for not following the law 'to the T', and more spammers are just getting prosecuted for various charges. Looks like the law finally is on the side of the spamee's. Looks like we may be in for some good times in the near future...

Re:A Swing in the right direction

[walt-sjc]

Oh my.

It's too bad we don't educate our kids to learn how to use the Shift key.

But back to the topic at hand, if nobody can build a general purpose secure OS, how the fuck do you expect anyone to create a messaging system which the main purpose of is to allow any-to-any communication that is invunerable to spam and still a viable system to be used by businesses and the masses in general? Do you REALLY think that spammers won't find a way around technical limitations?

Imagine a society with no laws. You can be killed by anyone, have your stuff stolen, your daughter raped and no laws to stop it. Only the strong survive. Warlords control everything. This is essentially the internet as it is today.

Back in the "good old days" before AOL invaded Usenet, laws were not really needed. The community for the most part policed itself. This is no longer possible.

We now need laws to enforce proper behavior. Will this stop all spam? No. Do laws against shoplifting stop all theft? No. Do they discurage most people from shoplifting every time they enter a store? Yes, they do. They provide a way for shop owners to protect themselves.

The bottom line is that we KNOW anti-spam laws will not stop all spam. It will however reduce it significantly.

Catching them on fraud

[PhysicsGenius]

That's a very good plan. They claimed to be opt-in but weren't, so sue them. Nice. Kind of how they got Al Capone for tax avoision, not racketeering or murder. It's a lot easier to prove the former.

The best of it is that they can put these guys behind bars while skipping right by the free speech issue. While normally I hold the first amendment to the highest standards, I favor suspending it for spammers.

"ignored" - hardly

[AssFace]

ignored at least 750,000 requests by consumers to be taken off their lists.

I'm sure they didn't ignore them - they use those responses to determine that they now have a confirmed live e-mail address which is worth more than a bunch of e-mail addresses that nobody checks.
so I'm sure they don't just ignore them - they likely instead do just the opposite and have much interest in those 750,000 responses and gave them a little extra attention... like logging them in their database as "live" or something like that.

All I have to say about this is 1) I wish I had thought of it all in 1995 - could have made a bundle and 2) SpamAssassin rules!

datacommarketing.com

[Openadvocate]

Maybe someone could do something about the infamous datacommarketing.com. It is so annoying to get your mail servers spammed by their name guessing server(65.242.117.50).
Now I can't see their homepage because I have blocked their entire subnet in my router :), but I seem to remember their homepage saying that they don't spam. Sorry, but I have got the logs to prove it, and so does many others.
How on earth can a company like that just continue act like they do?

Corporations want first amendment right too

[Anonymous Coward]

Fraud is not protected speech.

Oh, but it will be soon

"...Instead of refuting Kasky's charge by proving in court that they didn't lie, however, Nike instead chose to argue that corporations should enjoy the same "free speech" right to deceive that individual human citizens have in their personal lives...They took this argument all the way to the California Supreme Court, where they lost. The next stop may be the U.S. Supreme Court in early January"

Neat, ain't it.

Results

[tiltowait]

This apparently actually produces results:

Earlier this month, said Ralsky, somebody told the Chinese government that a Web company from which he leases e-mail servers in Beijing was sending messages critical of Chinese policy.

Police promptly raided the business and confiscated Ralsky's servers. Although they were returned a few days later, Ralsky now tries to cover his tracks better, so opponents won't know what companies and servers he's using.

Linford said he heard of the raid. "It wasn't us that caused it," he said. "But there are a lot of anti-spam activists, and apparently some of them on their own started organizing a campaign to get the Chinese government to think that Ralsky was supporting" the Falun Gong, an outlawed spiritual group the Chinese government considers subversive. "We didn't endorse that, but it shows you how deep the anti-Ralsky feelings are."

- http://www.freep.com/money/tech/mwend22_20021122.h tm

He should get 47 years in prison.

[pclminion]

Assuming that only 1/5 (100,000,000) spams reached human recipients, and assuming each person wasted 15 seconds recognizing it as spam, cursing, and deleting it, we have a total waste of time:

15*100000000/3600/24/365 = 47 years.

Maybe he should have 47 years of his time wasted.

(No, I'm not actually serious. But that's a lot of wasted time.)

Re:DON'T REALLY DO THIS

[wytcld]

In China ... there may not be an opportunity to refute such charges before an impartial court

An understatement. There's no impartial court, so no opportunity. Still, a friend's band is called "The Nail Nippers," with some samples on an mp3 site. They keep getting e-mails from China and elsewhere in Asia offering to supply them with nail nippers. These letters are written in good enough English, apparently by someone using data mining software to find every e-mail address on every Website that mentioned "nail nippers" - since if a human had read my friend's site it's just obvious it's the band's name.

So, is every factory in China staffed by people who write sophisticated data mining software? Or is there some quiet central government program that is helping facilitate spam in order to build China's export businesses? There's a certain likelihood that really doing this (replying to the spam with dangerous keywords) would really be tripping up the Chinese government, not some innocent little factory spam manager.

Of course, if you don't share my view that the legitimate government of China sits in Taiwan you may still consider this a bad thing. Those of us who favor armed insurrection on behalf of Tibet, Fulun Gong and freedom generally might even welcome it if the illegitimate government got more involved in chasing its own tail, rather than focusing effectively on suppressing and killing Tibetans and those with unauthorized spiritual faiths.

Sure, the innocent could suffer the worst fates; but the innocent already do. It's the sort of tough ethical dilemma where a choice may spare two innocent lives, but take another.