MonsterHut Jammed for Spam

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Posted by ryuzaki0 on Thursday January 23, 2003 @02:23AM from the good-start dept.

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."

26 of 286 comments (clear)

Heh by Anonymous Coward · 2003-01-23 02:24 · Score: 3, Funny

Officials were quoted as saying the CEO would be punished by being force fed thousands of cans of Spam a day.
How long by tmark · 2003-01-23 02:24 · Score: 3, Interesting

Before all these spam companies just move off-shore to avoid litigation ?
1. Re:How long by Anonymous Coward · 2003-01-23 02:34 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  Like that'll stop US courts deciding they have power over everything out of their borders.
2. Re:How long by PhxBlue · 2003-01-23 02:39 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  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.
  
  --
  !#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
3. Re:How long by Steve+B · 2003-01-23 03:06 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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.
4. Re:How long by Zeinfeld · 2003-01-23 03:08 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  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.
  
  --
  Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
  Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
5. Re:How long by sakeneko · 2003-01-23 07:29 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Before all these spam companies just move off-shore to avoid litigation?
  
  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
Ironic by jyuter · 2003-01-23 02:26 · Score: 3, Interesting

That Monsterhut.com lists links to spam filters.
A Swing in the right direction by FortKnox · 2003-01-23 02:27 · Score: 4, Interesting

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...

--
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
1. Re:A Swing in the right direction by walt-sjc · 2003-01-23 03:58 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  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.
2. Re:A Swing in the right direction by odaiwai · 2003-01-23 04:43 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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
Catching them on fraud by PhysicsGenius · 2003-01-23 02:29 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.
1. Re:Catching them on fraud by Uninvited+Guest · 2003-01-23 02:50 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Fraud is not protected speech. There is no free speech issue for such cases.
  
  --
  Sometimes I worry that I'll develop Alzheimer's disease, but no one will notice.
HOW TO Deal With Chinese Spam by Amsterdam+Vallon · 2003-01-23 02:29 · Score: 5, Funny

The government just ordered all ISPs in China to start monitoring email for subversive phrases and the like, so I started replying to Chinese spam with little replies of the form at the end of this spam. Might be a useful tactic on companies who think that unsolicited email is "just regular advertising."

"Jack(export manager)" wrote:
>
> Dear Sir
> How are you .
>
> We are a lighting factory in China ,It is glad
> to introduce ourselves to you:
>
> I am XUBIN (Jack) , XUBIN is my chinese name , you can just
> call me Jack !! , I am export manager of [deleted] ,
> China, our group have four factory
[snipped]
>
> Here is our company profile :
>

[Rest of sales talk snipped]

(And now, the reply)

Thank you for your coded order. The weapons and ammunition will ship by way of the usual route in ten days, and you already know our secret Swiss bank account number to wire the payment to.

It is a pleasure doing business with you for so long, and I hope your cause will prevail. I am new to this particular computer, so I hope the encryption is working and the monitoring authorities cannot read what I am sending you.

Long live the Falun Gong! Free Tibet!

Best regards, Your arms supplier

(from http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/02/Feb/spam.html )

--

Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
Re:Very easy solution by mistered · 2003-01-23 02:35 · Score: 5, Informative

Actually it's not a very easy solution, since in most cases "the provider which sent it" can be very difficult to determine. The From: address is completely useless, of course. You can track back through the Received: headers to find (most likely) an open relay that send the spam to you. More than likely it's in China and complaints to its owner will do nothing. Spammers also like open relays that don't add useful Received: headers (i.e., don't put the IP address in) so good luck finding out where the spam really came from.

--
Enjoy your job, make lots of money, work within the law. Choose any two.
It's about time by andyring · 2003-01-23 02:38 · Score: 3, Informative

I'm glad judges and juries are finally seeing the light and understanding this whole spam mess. Free speech? Nope. It's just like junk fax laws, junk faxes are actually illegal because the recipient pays for the fax machine, paper, toner, etc. Same reason why telemarketers cannot call your cell phone (if you do get a call from them on it, just tell them it's a cell and they'll hang up quick) because you're paying for those minutes. With spam, I'm the one paying for my 'net connection, and after a certain amount of traffic, I pay by the byte. If only I could force direct mail marketers to stop snail-mailing me crap all the time. Why does a single 24-year-old guy need coupons for feminine hygiene products?
What's scary by Anonymous Coward · 2003-01-23 02:44 · Score: 4, Funny

is that there are 750,000 idiots out there who tried to have their names taken off a spammer's list.
"ignored" - hardly by AssFace · 2003-01-23 02:46 · Score: 5, Interesting

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!

--

There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Point of clarification... by Compulawyer · 2003-01-23 02:47 · Score: 4, Informative

...for all the non-lawyers (and non- "Law & Order" watchers) out there. In New York, the "Supreme Court" is the trial court - the lowest level in the system. The next step is the Appellate Division and finally the Court of Appeals. NY's C of A is analogous to other states' Supreme Courts. And no, I have no idea why they did it like that.

--
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
DON'T REALLY DO THIS by socratic+method · 2003-01-23 02:52 · Score: 5, Insightful

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
1. Re:DON'T REALLY DO THIS by wytcld · 2003-01-23 04:29 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  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.
  
  --
  "with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
datacommarketing.com by Openadvocate · 2003-01-23 02:54 · Score: 3, Interesting

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?

--
my sig
Corporations want first amendment right too by Anonymous Coward · 2003-01-23 02:54 · Score: 3, Interesting

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 by tiltowait · 2003-01-23 03:17 · Score: 3, Interesting

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. by pclminion · 2003-01-23 03:51 · Score: 4, Interesting

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:How I deal with spam. by Tim+C · 2003-01-23 03:56 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.