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FTC vs Spammers
binaryDigit writes "The San Jose Mercury News has an article on the FTC getting ready to take action on an (alleged) spammer. 'The Federal Trade Commission said today that after receiving about 46,000 complaints it had asked a federal judge to halt the operation.' Too bad it took 46000 complaints to prompt some action, but at least some action is being taken. The FTC will focus on the "deception" involved (innocent and misleading subject lines, bogus (but real) from/reply to addresses, etc)."
46000, and then they decide to take action... that's awful.
- colin
We've seen info on some spammers with their mansions and high priced lifestyles paid for by spam revenues here on /.
As long as they are hit with simple fines or only shut down temporarily, or only forced to change their tactics, they'll keep going. They make too much money to stop.
They'll only stop when sending spam costs more than their rewards. When they are fined enough or sued for enough that they lose their expensive new houses and other trappings of luxery, then they'll think about it.
In the meantime, don't expect the FTC or anyone from the Bush administration to do anything more than slap the hand of anyone making a good deal of money.
If it's going to take over 40k in e-mails per spammer to get the FTC to take action, think how much in terms of time and resources it's going to cost us just to report these guys. It's almost as if the FTC is some sort of reverse spammer, draining network resources by forcing us to spam them to get them to do something about spamming... Somewhat ironic if nothing else.
Overrated Moderation: This posts sucks... because.
Yeah, that's just what we need -- governments passing laws to outlaw things that the majority of the population doesn't like. I wonder other unpopular things they're looking at banning. At least Ashcroft hasn't labeled spammers as enemy combatants engaged in cyberterrorism and shipped them all off to Guantonomo Bay without a trial -- yet.
Spoken like a true spammer.
The government has a long history of regulating how a business advertises. Perhaps you long for the day when a business could completely lie in its advertising, but I don't.
Many people are in the same line of thought I have noticed, they surely wouldn't want it happening to them, but to someone they don't like it's completly acceptable. That's why our justice system is struggling, there are many too many people who see it that way.
Posting useless rant since 2003.
We all just need to change our corporate spam filters, to forward all unwanted spam to the FTC. I'm sure that will get the ball moving...
Is it possibly for stories to be posted without someone's cynical or uninformed opinion? Yes, I realize this is Slashdot but it is beyond annoying at this point. How does the submitter know what the relevance of the number of complaints is? Maybe the FTC has some minimum number of people that must complain before they take action and many of the complaints were from the same person.
First of all, it was a joke. Your sense of humor probably went down the toilet with your brain:
Of course no one wants it to happen to them. It wouldn't be a punishment otherwise.
No one wants to be imprisoned, either, but it is PERFECTLY ACCEPTABLE for the government to imprison people that have broken the law. Prison is a form of punishment -- you're not there to get rewarded with cookies.
evil adrian
There's this enormous flood washing over us, and we see a few tiny people down there, holding up their hands trying to stop the massive amounts of water drowning the village.
Yeah, that'll work.
Don't be a moron. No one is saying that criminals shouldn't be punished for their crimes, but incarceration is to deprive them of their freedom and to protect the society. Not to inflict beatings or anal raping.
I don't recall a judge, when passing a sentence, saying that "and to suffer humiliation and degragation of human dignity in prison".
Run all incoming mail through Spam Assassin and forward any message that are found spam to the FTC with the subject changed to "Complaint about spammer info and proof within". Lets say that only 0.01% of the population does it and lets assume that there are 7*10^6 net users that each recive 10 spams/days. So that's 7*10^4 e-mails to the FTC a day, every day.
I wonder how many orders to cease operations will this cause
--
Lets make spam the new game of Russian Rollete.
"This is going to bring spamming on behalf of legitimate businesses to a screeching halt."
Perhaps... But 90% of the shit these guys peddle is hardly legitimate.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I agree in theory, but disagree in practice. Rather than going after the big fish and then heading on down the line, if you hit them all equally, you'll strike fear in all spammers, not just the big ones.
Analogy: you've got a few illegal MP3s on your HD, and you see the RIAA cracking down on those with thousands of MP3s... You're not worried, they've got bigger fish to fry. But if they simultaneously go after the little guys too, you'll think, "that could have been me!" and be scared. More so at least than you might otherwise be. So while the big guys might be afraid now, the little guys aren't the least bit worried. Better to scare all of 'em.
This is, in essence, the FTC saying, "only big spammers are in trouble, the rest are in the clear". We don't want this.
PS: 1.5 years spam free.
Synergy is your friend
Did it occur to you that maybe it didn't take 46,000 complaints, but rather that it took a certain amount of time to prepare their case, and during that time they received 46,000 complaints? I don't think they were sitting around waiting for the total to reach 46,000 before taking action.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Wow. If that part didn't look bogus, I would hope everyone would think an address of 12345 and a phone number (minus area code) of 123-4567 would give it away.
The stone part I think was looking past the even more obvious bits.