Dictionary Spammer Fined $55,000 for Spam Attack

Lawrence_Bird writes "In a first, a Japanese district court has ordered a spammer to pay restitution to NTT DoCoMo for abuse of their imode system. 'The damage caused by large amounts of e-mail not reaching their destinations should be covered by the sender,' said the judge. The fine is about $55,000 and was based on an estimated cost to NTT of 1.2 yen per undelivered spam ($0.01) for the 4 million spams that were undeliverable. What is most startling is NTT DoCoMo assertion that of the 950 million emails they receive each day, 880 million are not deliverable!"

Comments

A great precedent!

[Bvardi]

Now if only more countries would do this kind of thing - recognizing that spam has a financial impact on ISPs and on the end consumer, and that especially mass "dictionary" based attacks to randomly find accounts are the internet equivilent of dropping millions of leaflets from an airplane for advertising purposes. (In which case they'd be rightly charged with littering and other offences.)

Plus they got zapped for undelivered email - avoids the whole "opt in/opt out" argument (difficult to prove always that someone didn't accidentally "opt in" at SOME point and you KNOW the spammer is going to claim that they did) AND it also is likely far more costly than targetted spam attacks. (If you send to a 90 percent valid email list chances are you are sending to a few hundred thousand addresses. You do a dictionary attack you are sending to MILLIONS of addresses... which would you rather see them get charged cash for?)

It's a good start if you ask me (though of course part of me thinks that locking them in a small room with one angry ferret per 1000 emails would be a good way too... but that might be going too far. Probably. I mean, think of the poor ferrets?)

Bvardi