AOL Sues Five Spam Companies

sugapablo writes "AOL has filed lawsuits against five spamming companies, seeking damages in the millions for unwanted email. As the AP reports, AOL hasn't actually figured out who all the defendants are though, filing the lawuits against some "John Does" and attempting to "subpoena service providers and others to try to track down the spammers"."

Comments

AOL should sue themselves

[wiggys]

So can I sue AOL for spamming me with all those frigging CDs?

Re:AOL should sue themselves

[Andy Tanenbaum]

No joke. At least those damn AOL floppies could be overwritten and put to use. AOL could have the decency to spam with CD-RW discs.

Re:AOL should sue themselves

[island_earth]

So can I sue AOL for spamming me with all those frigging CDs?

That depends. Does AOL make you pay shipping and handling for those CDs? No? Then it's not spam.

Direct marketing (i.e., junk mail, paid by the sender) may be odious, but it's a different issue from spam (essentially free to the sender, burden to pay on the rest of us, including AOL). AOL is not really being hypocritical by fighting one and using the other, no matter how funny it may seem to claim otherwise.

Re:AOL should sue themselves

[island_earth]

Recall that I never said that junk mail was good; just that it's different enough that AOL can fight spam and send CDs without being hypocrites.

Another key difference: although you shouldn't have to opt-out of junk mail, you can, and it mostly works. I contact the Direct Marketing Association every few years to tell their members to cut it out, and the only junk mail I get for the most part is crap my family actually requests. I haven't seen an AOL CD in years, to be honest.

Junk mail sucks, and I'd love to see it abolished, but it follows some rules we can work with, if we bother to. Spam is an uncontrolled mess, and needs to be slapped down hard. AOL isn't being hypocritical by doing that.

Maybe their lawyers should ask me

[thogard]

A major spamer just hit one of my test boxes and in the millions of messages that went to my logging server, there are clues into who is behind some of this.

Re:Maybe their lawyers should ask me

[Ironstud]

So why was your box not locked down? Aren't you as liable for allow relay to happen on your SMTP server? I had it happen to me right after I installed a new server on my SDSL line -- so I can feel your pain -- I was configuring it when it happen. They really hit fast the smtp server was up for only 5 minutes when a spammer discovered it.

Re:Maybe their lawyers should ask me

[thogard]

It wasn't locked down. It was running a stock NT4 (just like some of our customers). However there as a another box sitting between it and the wire that wasn't so eager to send packets off to port 25 on remote servers. The network looked like a connection with something funny going on. The result is that when the box came back on the net (it looks like a typical office machine behind a nated router), it would phone home and then a remote server would connect to the proxy that hte hackers insalled and try to send out messages. The 1st set of addresses go to a specifc set of addresses and then after a short time (if and only if the right address does get sent), then the box would get hit with hundreds of socket connections to its proxy. Once it did that it attempted to deliver a million or so messages in a very samll time. Once I had figured out their game, I could let their test messages through while blocking spam to most of the net. Most of the leaks involved @aol addresses because thats where the test accounts are. I faked accepance of about 5 million messages and flat out rejected millions more. I figure if this system had been up for more than about an hour (and truly open), it could have easly send a billion messages in a week.

In the local sage mailing list, someone mentioned that he hadn't gotten any spam that day. His email address was in the list list of stuff I rejected several times.

Re:Maybe their lawyers should ask me

[Latent IT]

So... in theory, all I need is an "open" relay, use firewall rules to prevent it from actually sending mail out, and then... I can harvest a list of millions of e-mail addresses that's as good as what the spamming pros use, since it's their list?

Holy crow.

Now, if only I hated humanity enough to actually put this plan into action...

Overseas spammers?

[theLOUDroom]

Wouldn't it be kinda funny if all the John Does turned out to be in foreign countries?

Back to the drawing board huh guys?

Re:Overseas spammers?

[azzy]

Wouldn't it be funny if they all turned out to be AOL customers...

Hate em all you want

[Jesus IS the Devil]

I know we all like to bash Aohell, but at least they're one ISP that seems to be doing something right these days... fighting spam to its death... unlike 99% of all other ISPs.

So where is Sanford Wallace these days?

Re:Hate em all you want

[wiggys]

Exactly. Suing 5 spammers won't wipe out spam overnight but it should send a strong message to the other spamming bastards out there.

Re:Hate em all you want

[AKnightCowboy]

I know we all like to bash Aohell, but at least they're one ISP that seems to be doing something right these days... fighting spam to its death... unlike 99% of all other ISPs.

They're just fighting it because it isn't AOL advertising. I had to use AOL to check my e-mail when I was over a friend's house once and holy sheep shit batman. Right when you log on you get assaulted with tons of banner ad spam. AOL just wants an exclusive market for their spam instead of sharing it.

Re:Hate em all you want

[McDutchie]

So where is Sanford Wallace these days?

According to this article, he now runs a non-spam autoresponder service. But there are a good 150 hardcore spammers who took his place.

Re:Hate em all you want

[McDutchie]

I had to use AOL to check my e-mail when I was over a friend's house once and holy sheep shit batman. Right when you log on you get assaulted with tons of banner ad spam. AOL just wants an exclusive market for their spam instead of sharing it.

Please keep your terminology straight. Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail sent postage due. Annoying as they are, banner ads are not spam any more than commercial breaks on television. Not only are they not e-mail but they are actually paid for by the advertisers and you are soliciting them by logging on to the AOL service that includes these ads, i.e. you have the option not to do so, just as you can turn off your TV.

Comparing spam to banner ads confuses the issue by making spam seem more legitimate than it really is. It cannot be repeated enough: spam is theft of service, parasitic traffic living off of bandwidth and manhours paid for by others. This is the message that needs to be hammered into those that matter in the grand scheme of things, so that the appropriate laws get passed to throw the perpetrators in jail where they belong.

Re:Hate em all you want

[hetairoi]

I know it's useless, but I'm gonna do it anyway, just to make myself feel better.

You can easily turn off all the AOL banner ads and most of the other offending material, just go to preferences\marketing and set everything to off.

Also, I'd like to point out that AOL is one of the very few ISP's that offer dialup from almost anywhere, with no extra charges for out of towners. Back when I travelled all over the country this was of great importance to me.

Recently, since the spam blocking feature was implemented in 8.0 I've noticed much less spam going to my open aol account. Sure, I still get a good bit, but I can tell it's dropping, I used to get hundreds of spams/day, now I only get about 25 or so. Also, I have another screenname where I use the built in blocking tools, sure they aren't great, but I NEVER get spam to that email address, if only because it blocks everyone I don't accept.

My AOL account is used by 4 people in 3 different states. AOL has never even questioned this, please tell me of another ISP that wouldn't freak when different users logged in from different states. My parents use it and a couple of my friends use it for email and some web browsing. Oh, and even though they likely don't know it, you can minimize the aol window and use whatever browser you choose. I will also point out here that AOL does not kick you off for inactivity anymore, or even pop up a msg telling you you've been idle (ok, the buddy list msg pops up, but that's it). That hasn't been part of AOL since about version 4.0.

And about all those cd's they send out, there are tons of uses for them. I've always got plenty of coasters, even though I rarely get an AOL cd in the mail anymore. I really like the cases they use now too, toss the cd and I have a new cd case to use with cd's of my choice.

I proudly admit to having an aol account for at least 10 years. The only problem I have ever had with AOL was back when they had the huge surge of users and I kept getting busy signals, but hey, sometimes business is better than you expect. It only took them a few months to get enough lines up in my area and I haven't seen that problem since then.

As to your point about AOL advertising to it's users, well, yeah, duh, they are in the business of making money. I see nothing wrong with this. They offer a channel for their users to buy things, if a particular user doesn't want to use those channels they can turn them off, easily.

Sorry for the rant, but I just don't get why so many people just bash AOL because 'AOL users suck'. Maybe it's the same thing with Wal-Mart, they are hated because they are successful, both started out as small, individually owned companies and have grown into enormous intergalactic corporations.

\sigh\ If I didn't know that this post isn't going to get read I'd feel like I were committing karma suicide by admitting that I actually like AOL.

How do they know it's five?

[Shoten]

How do they know it's five spammers and not, say, ten? Nice to see George Moore in the list of known defendants though :)

This did not happen

[Mohammed Al-Sahaf]

This is yet another lie. These companies did not send any spam. Today we slaughtered them in the airport. They are out of Saddam International Airport. The force that was in the airport, this force was destroyed. The American press is all about lies! All they tell is lies, lies and more lies!

Not just spam.

[FyRE666]

Surely they could also sue for "wire fraud", sue to the ridiculous and blatently untrue claims in most of the spam. Then there's the pyramid schemes, 419 scams etc. I'd think in those cases, it would be more lucrative to lodge complaints about the contents of the spam the scumbags are sending rather than the spam itself. "73 million counts of wire fraud" sound good to me!

Re:Not just spam.

[alkali]

The animal known as "wire fraud" is a criminal violation of federal law. It's not a thing Joe Citizen can sue for. (Similarly "mail fraud.")

You can sue for garden-variety fraud under state law, but you have to have been actually defrauded (i.e., you actually believed some false statement and were damaged by relying on it). If you know you're being lied to, you haven't been defrauded.

Re:This defines irony...

[Ed Avis]

The day you get 100 'free CDs' every day and have to foot the postage charge yourself, you might have a valid complaint.

I'm Confused

[Col. Panic]

The enemy of my enemy is my friend? Lesser of two evils? I'm not sure how to feel about this. I think I'll hate them both.

Re:This defines irony...

[TCaM]

While I have no interest in the many free aol/earthlink/other isp cds I get in the mail, they have never reached the point where my mailbox has been overcome in a single day thus forcing my mail to be bounced. Aol pays postage and production costs for this crap, most spammers pay very little and generally do cause damage and increased costs to their victims.

One who isn't a John Doe

[AndroidCat]

AOL hasn't actually figured out who all the defendants are

They do know who at least one is: George Moore aka "Dr. Fatburn". Who is also being dragged into court by Symantec as well.

I wonder if his own actions to try to gag a web site turned him into a lawsuit magnet?

Who should be sued?

[ASPirant]

I find it interesting that they always go for the outlet doing the spamming. Why don't they sue the individuals paying the spammers to send the emails? Instead of trying to kill the spammers, starve them by making companies think twice about using this method.

You'd think that this means of advertising would actually destroy the "goodwill" of the product being advertised. I know I have less respect for companies that use this means.

Double standard of community opinon?

[MrLint]

Ok here is the disclaimer right off, I do not advocate spamming, and i think there needs to be a gulag that spammers are thrown into. That much said, from the article, "filing the lawsuits gives AOL additional authority to subpoena service providers and others to try to track down the spammers" I recall much derision when the RIAA sued Verizon for customer info of alleged music traders. Now AOL is suing to get spammer customer information. I think we need to seriously consider the possibility of situational ethics. The track record of scumminess of the RIAA is widely hated, so most don't like anything they do. Likewise spammers, also so widely hated so no one cares what happens to them (even me). When is getting a customer's info right, when is it wrong? I think this is a tough question we, as a community, have to think about and perhaps ultimately face in the future.

Re:Double standard of community opinon?

[rearden]

I may be off my mark here as IANAL but there is a big difference. AOL has proven that a) there has been a tangible violation of the law b) they have tracked the violater back to a particular system(s) c) they are suing the violator and not the company the violator is using to send email.

In the RIAA vs. Verizon case RIAA was suing to get the subscriber information without ever proving that there were specific incidences of copyright violation (instead charging that P2P is ONLY used to steal music). In addition they did not sue copyright violators (as a "Jane or John Doe") and then use supoenas to get the personons name. Instead they sued Verizon to get the information directly. Verizon's argument from the begining was that that RIAA was skipping step one- 1) Show evidence of a crime and step two- 2) Seek to take action against said anonymous criminal (this may seem odd, but our legal system allows us to sue an unknown person/ group and fill in their name later). Instead RIAA sued the people who "facilitated" the crime and stated that all of Verizons customer records should be on display to the RIAA Nazi SS forces without proof or ponderance in court.

AOL, as stated, is instead going directly after the offenders and using the power of the courts to get specific information about specific crimes, not all customer information at will and on demand.

Just my $0.02

Re:Double standard of community opinon?

[nolife]

Not quite:

RIAA wanted Verizon to turn over the the records without getting the courts involved. Verizon does not want to give this information out without a court order. AOL is going directly for the court order. Very different scenario..

What the RIAA really wants is to avoid the courts and use the DMCA for the inital step of information gathering so they can act faster and more efficiently for shutting people down. The disadvantage of this is that they are no checks and balances present without the courts involvment, the ability to request this information on a whim could very easily be abused and nothing in terms of real proof required that a copyright violation is truely occuring. What Verizon does not want is a precedent set where any company that feels a copyright violation has occured can request this information at will. This would be a great strain for Verizon to support this. They want a court order steps followed to limit these requests, kind of like a security deposit to prevent a flood of requests for user information.

The court battle they are in now is mainly to determine if organizations like the RIAA can request this information via the DMCA and without specific court approval. This is a much larger issue then RIAA vs. Verizon.

http://news.com.com/2100-1023-982809.html
http: //www.eff.org/Cases/RIAA_v_Verizon/

Hmm, maybe somebody else should sue spammers..

[xXunderdogXx]

Can't the people who make SPAM (the pseudomeat product) sue spammers for defamation of a brandname?

Re:Go AOL!

[Cutriss]

I hate AOL and all their users, but damn, this sounds great! Best of luck, AOL!

That's a rather broad brush that you're painting with. Some people here may be using AOL out of necessity. There are a lot of rural and small-town places I know of around here where no ISPs have POPs other than AOL.

Superglue + AOL CDs =

[Andy Dodd]

Great Christmas tree decorations. mmm shiny...

(Yes, I DO use a few CD sandwiches on the tree each year, they compliment the old family silicon wafers... Which are actually a lot nicer than you'd expect. They were rejects from a testing facility that had a tendency to oxidize the wafers in really colorful patterns. My family started using them just after my parents got married and they were both working in IC process development and didn't have anything else to put on the tree.)

Why I stopped hating AOL.

[doublem]

AOL gets a bad rap, and I've been trying to figure out why.

They are the reason Netscape is still around, and just about all the money that went into developing Mozilla came from AOL.

They pay for the development of Winamp, and distribute it free of charge.

They created and maintain the single largest FREE Instant messaging client out there. AIM cost them money.

They have a simplified system that lets people new to computers and the Internet get online with little fuss. They are a decent entry level ISP.

They are one of the few competitors Microsoft has to take seriously.

They sue Spammers, or at least try to.

So why are they so hated?

Customer service sucks, is even predatory.

All those damn coasters they send out.

They're possibly the biggest ISP out there.

Lighten up. Someone out there started hating AOL and it's snowballed since then. If AOL dies Mozilla goes with it, as does AIM, Winamp and Netscape.

Mozilla might survive as a sourceforge project, but most of the developers will be gone. For all intents and purposes, it will be dead.