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

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.

Re:A Swing in the right direction

[odaiwai]

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

[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.

HOW TO Deal With Chinese Spam

[Amsterdam Vallon]

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 )

Re:Very easy solution

[mistered]

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.

What's scary

[Anonymous Coward]

is that there are 750,000 idiots out there who tried to have their names taken off a spammer's list.

"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!

Point of clarification...

[Compulawyer]

...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.

DON'T REALLY DO THIS

[socratic method]

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

Re:How long

[Steve B]

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.

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.

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:How I deal with spam.

[Tim C]

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.

Re:How long

[sakeneko]

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. :)