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)."

Comments

About time

[DaedalusHKX]

About time :)

Lets see if it actually helps deter them or if it just forces them to take different paths to annoying us further...

-DaedalusHKX

Unwanted solicitation

[CrazyJim0]

Don't use my phone, email, pager, mail, or any personal communications methods to try and sell me something without my prior consent.

The worst of the worst.

[st0rmcold]

All spammers are bad, but they gotta start with the worst in these cases. It's true that a deceptive email subject line bringing you to a porn site is alot worse than someone trying to sell you a pair of shoes (to parents anyway).

So even if it's not everything, it's a step in the right direction, I am happy :P

Brian D. Westby of St. Louis

[I'm A Librarian]

The FTC accused Brian D. Westby, of suburban St. Louis, of using the e-mail spam operation to drive business to an adult Web site called ``Married But Lonely.''

Would anyone in St. Louis like to ask this guy what his take on it is?

The FTC? What a Joke...

[Justen]

The FTC has become a joke lately. Even Congress thinks so (on the issue of privacy).

From credit to business mergers to privacy, and, yes, spam, the FTC seems to always screw up something. (While the companies were busy forgetting due diligence, you can bet the FTC was, too...)

They'll likely compile a list of all the email addresses that were spammed to and make them available to spammers.

Now that's my government working for me!

justen

Please God

[Glonoinha]

Please God let it be those fuckers carpet bombing the planet with the 'Click Here to meet Married Women in your town' spam. Their return address and Subject lines morph into something different every message, the entire message is HTML encoded to break up every character of every word (makes it a bitch to filter,) and they are fire-hosing down every email address I have so I don't think it was me 'opting-in' to anything because I wouldn't have opted in every damn email address I have.

If it is this Brian D Westby fellow doing this, I say douse him in gasoline and light his ass on fire.

Spamassassin and recent false-negatives

[trentfoley]

I run a small mail server with a dozen or so accounts. I have been using spamassassin for quite a while and it has been awesome.

However, there have been a slew of recent spams that have made it through. The subject lines are simple things such as "Hello". This is also the same subject line of ALL of my mother's emails; after all, that's how she answers the phone. The content is nothing more than an image tag pointing to a screenshot of the ad. Spamassassin doesn't complain since there is not enough wrong with the email - they usually score around 1 or 2 (which is way too low to set a threshold, 5 is reasonable). I could alter the scoring rules, but that would create way too many false positives since many emails are just links to political cartoons and the like.

I don't think bayesian filtering would help the problem.

I keep forwarding them to uce@ftc.gov. Maybe I'll submit the 46,000th entry and win a prize!

Also get free POP3 Hotmail access for spam free HM

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

Take a look at http://www.boolean.ca/hotpop/ "HotPop". It is a proxy that gives you POP3 access to your Hotmail account. So you can have: Outlook (connects to) POPFile (connects to) HotPop

Result? In Outlook, you get all your POP3 accounts and Hotmail, delivered into one inbox with no spam. Never need to manually check Hotmail etc. And with a hotsync, it all goes into my Palm Tungsten T. Sweet. And for the un-1337, POPFile is easy to setup and use on Wind0z3 b0x3n :)

One more thing... DISABLE ANTIVIRUS E-MAIL SCANNING before you install POPFile. Don't re-ename the scanning software until after everything is talking to everything else perfectly.

As much as spammer's suck

[rsilvergun]

I hardly think this is the kind of crime we should be sending people to jail over. I'm of the opinion that jail is something that should be reserved for violent offenders; and maybe repeat non-violent offenders. For the same reason I think it's absurd to send a kid to jail for downloading mp3s, I don't think this guy belongs in jail.

On the other hand, I'd be more than happy to see him fined up the wazoo and opened up to lawsuits from victims.

Re:As much as spammer's suck

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, someone sending spam porn to someone's work e-mail addy w/ a false subject line, and them being fired because someone catches them "looking at porn" isn't a big deal at all, it doesn't hurt anyone in any way. . .

Maybe just a slap on the wrist is too harsh for these spammers?

This offense, as with any (imho) should be delt with extremely harshly, and each occurance, regardless of the outcome should be delt with as if it achieved the aforementioned results.

Re:As much as spammer's suck

[Sloppy]

Yeah, someone sending spam porn to someone's work e-mail addy w/ a false subject line, and them being fired because someone catches them "looking at porn" isn't a big deal at all, it doesn't hurt anyone in any way. . .

Not to defend spammers, but...

I think that if something like that really happens, the spammer is not responsible for you getting fired. The manager who fired you is responsible. His crime is stupidity. The company's profits will suffer as a result of keeping the stupid person around, who fires people for no reason. Justice is done.

The FTC now says they can regulate spam

[Animats]

The FTC's legal position is significant. Read the legal documents in the case. First, the FTC says they have the legislative authority to regulate spam, because they have the authority to regulate false or misleading advertising. Second, they don't draw a distinction between the spammer and the business being advertised:

• Because the "Married But Lonely" spam forges the identity of the sender, it is unclear whether Westby sends the spam himself or whether he employs someone else to send it. Even if he does hire someone to send the spam, he is still liable for these practices. Westby is liable for deceptive or unfair practices he engages in himself or for those of his employees or agents who are acting on his behalf. Under the FTC Act, a principal is liable for misrepresentations made by agents with actual or apparent authority to make such representations, regardless of any unsuccessful efforts by the principal to prevent such misrepresentations.
• See Southwest Sunsites, Inc. v. FTC, 785 F.2d 1431, 1438-39 (9th Cir. 1986); FTC v. Skybiz.com, Inc., 2001 WL 1673645, at *9 (N.D. Okla. Aug. 31, 2001); FTC v. Five-Star Auto Club, Inc., 97 F. Supp. 2d 502, 527 (S.D.N.Y. 2000). It is inappropriate for a principal to "`reap the fruits from their [agents'] acts and doings without incurring such liabilities as attach thereto."' Skybiz.com, 2001 WL 1673645, at *9 (quoting Goodman v. FTC, 244 F.2d 584, 591-92 (9th Cir. 1957)).

Note what the FTC is saying. They don't even have to prove that the business being advertised by spam paid the spammer. If someone benefitted from the spam, the beneficiary is liable.

If a court agrees, as is likely, you don't sue spammers any more. You go after the deep pocket - the business being advertised. This is going to bring spamming on behalf of legitimate businesses to a screeching halt.

Re:The FTC now says they can regulate spam

[Anonymous Coward]

Two comments.
First, "This is going to bring spamming on behalf of legitimate businesses..." is a nonsensical statement. Any business that deliberately uses spamming, either from their own computers of from a 'contracted ethikul bizzniss' is not a 'legitimate company'.

Second, this is potentially dangerous, as it could possibly open up business to liability when someone spams using their name in a deliberate attempt to defame the company (called a 'joe-job'). This has happened before, and I don't like the idea of the FTC holding companies responsible simply because some criminal (all spammers are criminals) decided to spam out the company's name. Of course, you would need to find some means to determine which businesses are really victims and which are really lying about being victims. Remember, spammers are liars, so companies who contract spam can be counted on to lie about it afterwards -- especially if there are financial consequences to their actions.

Re:Forward your spam to the FTC

[tignom]

I read about this a while ago and uce@ftc.gov became my "public" email address. Whenever a website demands an email address and I know it's gonna end up on a spam list, I just let them send it directly to the ftc. At least they'll (maybe) give it the attention it deserves instead of just getting annoyed.

Side note - I had to install Real Player on my work machine the other day (don't ask), and that address was already on their mailing list. So were all my backup addresses: abuse@site, webmaster@site, postmaster@site, root@site, abuse@aol.com, abuse@hotmail.com. Site is whatever site I'm visiting.

Limits

[Daetrin]

I totally agree, The FTC has to have some kind of limit on how many complaints are needed before they take action against someone, and 46,000 isn't that large a number when you're talking about a country with 300 million people in it.

The FTC taking action against Microsoft or Disney because 100 people sent email to the FTC might sound funny, but you wouldn't be laughing when your or a friend's small buisness got shut down because some joker thought it would be funny or a neighbor was annoyed and a single email was enough to get the FTC moving.

quit yer bitchin!

[bryanthompson]

This is a good thing. 46k complaints is not that many, when you consider just how many people there are. It's not fair to directly compare that with the population, becuase it just wouldn't work, but It's still a small percentage of people that complained.
How many of us actually sent an email to the ftc complaining about spam? I bet most of the people bitching about this taking so long never formally complained.
The fact is, no government can respond to every complaint. I hardly hear anyone saying 'yaay, something good's coming out of this'. Oh wait, i know. Dems can't give any credit to President Bush's administration.

Solution: Spam the FTC!

[Chordonblue]

Hey, here's a thought. If it takes 46,000 users to alert the FTC to spam, perhaps the FTC should be 'opted-in' to a few of the things we're subjected to. Why bother directly complaining? Let the government attempt to sort out their own mailboxes for a while!

Send your spam to *.GOV - heh.

Consider the 46000 complaint question

[dacarr]

Figuring that I send a copy of every spam I receive to the FTC through the address uce@ftc.gov (averaging about 25 per week these days), and assuming that this person is responsible for sending maybe one of those per week, consider that they've received a few from me.

Now consider that at that ratio, you would basically need 11,500 of me to do this per week for four weeks. Seeing as it's more likely that the UCE addr4esws provided is not well known, it's more likely that it took a couple of months to amass that many spam complaints regarding this.

Re:It's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

It should be criminal to send porn spam to minors. Actually, I'm pretty sure it is. I don't know why it's been condoned until now.