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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)."
after receiving about 46,000 complaints
You've got to wonder why they didn't wait for 100,000.Microsoft please hi
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
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
It's a shame that nowhere in the article does the FTC even imply that the spammer will be sent to a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
evil adrian
Hopefully Mr. Westby will heretofore be "Lonely with Guido" in a minimum security facility for at least a few years.
We can only hope.
Don't use my phone, email, pager, mail, or any personal communications methods to try and sell me something without my prior consent.
God spoke to me
46000, and then they decide to take action... that's awful.
- colin
This is the obligatory SPAM thread plug for bayesian filtering.
If you're not already doing it, give it a go in one of its many forms.
I've been using POPFile for ages and it works a treat.
...if we get 46,000 complaints about Rick Berman, the FTC will take some action!
Your paranoia is about as subtle as the alien probe in your neck.
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
Posting useless rant since 2003.
Possibly uce@ftc.gov? That's the address I've been sending them to.
"Want in one hand and spit in the other and see which one fills up first." - My Dad
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
Y'know, it's funny how while laws might require them to have an address to contact to become unsubscribed from the list, I'm wondering where the enforcement is. Or, where they're required to have a working address?
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
Oh cmon, these people are so picky. What sort of shut-in do you have to be to consider sex with dogs and horses "sexually explicit"?
Sheesh.
If this article confuses you, don't worry. It was posted yesterday in a much clearer fashion.
... but the other 54,000 complaints turned out to be spam.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
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.
Not yet is right -- what if those spammers are trying to sell Weapons of Ass Destruction?
evil adrian
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.
Okay, so my bash script was responsible for 32,767 of those, who was the other guy?
If you outlaw spam, only criminals will have spam. They can take my spam from me when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.
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.
Hey Malda, why didn't you convert your patent encumbered gifs to png?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
A slashdot article FTC Encourages Consumers to Forward Them Spam was posted on September 7, 2002 stating that the FTC wanted people to forward them spam at uce@ftc.gov.
Adidas To Bring Back Sneakernet
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...
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.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
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!
Here's the actual FTC announcement...
Why do I h8 apple?
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.
I think that the author means that the "From" address was a real, working email address. It just didn't happen to belong to the spammer. I believe this is called getting "Joe-Jobbed".
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.
Au contraire..
...
FTC privacy regulations are being accused of being too hard to follow for website operators! Aren't Slashfolk for _more_ privacy?
FTC apparently is doing a pretty good job overall..
Excerpts from recent Wall Street Journal article:
(April 4th 2003 by John Wilke)
"Devout Reaganite Becomes
An Unlikely Enforcer at FTC"
"Indeed, of the few federal regulatory agencies that really matter, his stands out because it's functioning vigorously: The Federal Communications Commission is nearly paralyzed, with board members in open revolt against the chairman; Harvey Pitt went down in flames at the Securities and Exchange Commission; and the Justice Department antitrust chief, Charles James, resigned amid criticism that he was a reluctant enforcer who caved on the Microsoft Corp. case.
Mr. Muris, unexpectedly, has become an aggressive enforcer. He's filed lawsuits against drug makers for cutting cozy deals with rivals and moved to promote competition where it is lacking in the health-care business, by investigating hospital mergers and alleged price fixing by doctors' groups. He has clipped attorneys' fees in class-action cases and told lawyers they aren't needed to close real-estate transactions. He has scolded funeral directors for banning online casket sales and targeted state rules used to restrict the sale of wine on the Internet. He has forced Microsoft to drop plans to harvest consumer data from its software, and in antitrust -- despite predictions that he'd be a soft touch for business -- he has challenged mergers in markets from ice cream to pickles.
Mr. Muris's most visible public legacy may be a federal "do not call" system to protect Americans from telemarketers, which he pushed through despite resistance from his own party in Congress. The system could be in operation as soon as this summer, allowing consumers an easy way to shield themselves from dinnertime calls from telemarketers."
"Most votes on the agency's five-member board are now unanimous. "We're the only game in town right now, where government is actually looking out for consumers," says Mozelle Thompson, a Democratic commissioner and early Muris critic who is now an ally."
On dealing with spam:
"Mr. Muris dropped that tack and instead boosted law-enforcement resources by 50%, and began prosecuting more identity-theft and fraud cases. He targeted unwanted e-mail by filing charges against hundreds of deceptive spammers. And he delighted in showing visitors "the refrigerator," a large data-storage unit deep in the FTC's granite headquarters where the nastiest forms of spam are stored and studied by FTC sleuths.
Consumer advocates say the FTC hasn't gone far enough to stem the rising tide of junk e-mail. "We're disappointed they haven't done more," said James Love, director of the Consumer Project on Technology, a Ralph Nader-affiliated nonprofit. He specifically criticizes Mr. Muris's decision not to seek new laws to restrict spammers."
WOAH.. the FTC commissioner wants to use existing laws instead of passing new fun filled blanket laws?
This happened about 2 weeks ago.
Our internal email in our office scans incoming and outgoing mail for viruses, spam, etc. Some spam slips through. In this case it was one of the numerous increase penile length spams.
When an email that is sent out and is blocked for some reason we are automatically notified. In this case someone forwarded the penile lotion lengther spam back to his home account so presumably he could read it later at home and perhaps try the product. This time it actually caught the spam going out when he tried forwarding it.
This "someone" was the president of our company. So far he hasn't asked us why the email he forwarded didn't go through. Of course we'll know if he eventually got it to go through when he starts wearing a loin cloth to work.
Some people consider this to be a nice surpise. "Oh look! It's porn and here I thought it was something about my resume". Then their spirits are lifted for a short while!
:)
Back in the land of reality this spammer should burn in hell
"I believe in everything in moderation. Including moderation." -Dean DeLeo, Stone Temple Pilots
It only takes that many complaints for the FTC to do something about a Spammer? Geeze... Thats not alot.. Should be Soo easy to wipe out the big Spam kings if it only takes 46,000 complaints to the FTC... considering there are Willions of people that it pisses off enough to do something about it... Not many know what to do about it... I Guess the answer is Complain to the FTC!
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
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.
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
- 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.
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 doubt anyone in prison really cares about spamming. They'd probably be like, "You got sent to prison for throwing meat at people? wtf".
I think it would be more like this: "I don't give a flying fuck what you're in here for.. give me your Cocktail FRUIT!
Feel free to make this guys life hell. I've received over 100 of his mortgage offers in the past two weeks and asking to be removed from his mailing list has done no good.
Here is the raw output for domain n0hastlem0rtgage.com:
Organization:
none
Mike Stone
12345 Stone rd
Stoneville, CA 92504
US
Phone: 916.123.4567
Email: vialead@yahoo.com
Amazingly enough, his yahoo account has already been terminated.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
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.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
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.
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.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Too bad it took 46000 complaints to prompt some action
Here at home, I usually average about 74,000 complaints before I get any action. *sigh*
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.
This sig no verb.
They're not going after the spammer, they're going after the person who sent them 46,000 messages.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.