Earthlink Wins Another Spam Award: $16 million

linuxwrangler writes "U.S. District Judge Thomas W. Thrash Jr. awarded Earthlink $16 million and an injunction against Howard Carmack for Carmack's use of Earthlink to deliver spam. Given that Earthlink is still awaiting payment of the $25 million it won against Kahn C. Smith last year, it views the injunction as the bigger of the two wins." A few more of these, and maybe the tide of spam will eb. Maybe. Nah.

Comments

That's "ebb"

[Osty]

Not "eb", but "ebb". "To fall away or back; decline or recede." Ebb.

Re:That's "ebb"

[shaitand]

This isn't informative! This is another spelling/grammer nazi!

Re:That's "ebb"

[KillerHamster]

This isn't informative! This is someone who complains too much!

Re:That's "ebb"

[_generica]

Not "grammer", but "grammar". "The study of how words and their component parts combine to form sentences." grammar

Re:That's "ebb"

[c4tp]

This isn't informative! This is another spelling/grammer nazi!
And how is this informative?

Karma: Excellent (whore)
Ohhh...

Re:That's "ebb"

[adamfranco]

While "grammar nazis" seem like a PITA, their presence does help make the comments on /. better spelled. While my "grammar" might not always be the best, I at least paste into OpenOffice and spell-check so as not to look like some completely ignorant fool.

Yes, "grammar nazis" can be annoying, but they do serve a purpose.

Re:That's "ebb"

[shaitand]

funny, but not informative damnit! *wink*

Re:That's "ebb"

[shaitand]

Actually your right... the nazi's do serve a purpose, although it's not to clean up slashdot. There purpose is to make people waste time reading their corrections (that they couldn't make if the mistake were severe enough it actually made it difficult to interpret) and thus reduce the negative effect of slashdotting small websites ;)

Re:That's "ebb"

[Anonymous Coward]

For god's sake, shut up.
Could you really not tell what he meant? Do you really have to sit there and correct everyone. Maybe putting other people down helps you justify your pathetic existence.

Re:That's "ebb"

[Enahs]

That would be "grammar" you drooling moron...

Re:That's "ebb"

[shaitand]

grammEr I said. Only a grammEr nazi would judge someone's intelligence by how they spelled and formed their sentences rather than the content of what they say.

Re:That's "ebb"

[the_ghost226]

No, but it is hard to believe that users who fancy themselves the intellectual elite of modern society do not even have a basic grasp of the language they speak.

Re:That's "ebb"

[Anonymous Coward]

If someone is too lazy or stupid to present their arguments with correct spelling and grammar, it's almost a given that there's nothing of interest there.

Why do you think every serious publication employs teams of editors?

Re:That's "ebb"

[shaitand]

Perhaps they realize they are only human and wasting time on slashdot as it is... since reading slashdot is more important than correcting spelling and grammar when errors don't confuse meaning... and taking a leak is more important... filing one's nail's is more important... eating an oreo in the way of one's preference is more important... actually I can't think of a single thing that doesn't rank higher on the priority list unless you actually are one of the editors you just spoke of.

I think every serious publication employs teams of editors because:

A. Every publication has foreign and otherwise near english illiterate readers and needs to make the best effort to collect their money.

B. Paying the editors is cheaper than paying enough people to sort grammar nazi mail.

C. They need someone to catch the errors that do matter and change meaning.

I however am not a serious publication, really couldn't care less about whether a foreign subject has trouble reading my slashdot post.

I have yet to find anything IMPORTANT that is being said by anybody anywhere on slashdot including myself. So errors that change meaning I might miss at a glance are insignificant... anything IMPORTANT that I am writing is going somewhere that has said publishers and they exist because most writters have horrid grammar and spelling. Cross reference successful writers with english related degrees and you'll find them the minority.

And finally I do correct any errors I see in my posts that appear to confuse meaning in any significant way. My posts are not generally difficult to read. At the very least you should spend your time grammar nazi'ing someone who is bad enough to be difficult to read.

Last but not least, I will no longer respond on this offtopic thread.

I wish I could get in on this

[AyeFly]

As my subject line says...I do, but I dont see how anyone other than large corporations can go through the process to actually get a judgement. I mean, I get mostly spam these days, even on an account I made, but never used a single time! Anyway, thats my rant for the day.

Re:I wish I could get in on this

[Eric Damron]

If you live in states with anti-spamming laws you may be able to sue the spammers. Not for millions of dollars however.

In Washington state we are allowed to sue for up to $500.00 per spam. However, the spammer must do something like give a false return address or misleading subject line.

You should check your state laws.

Re:I wish I could get in on this

[anthony_dipierro]

Don't you know, when Earthlink collects money, all of its customers save money!

(Oh c'mon, it's no more ridiculous than saying that spam costs the recipient money)

Re:I wish I could get in on this

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, you'd have to find the person, if you wanted to sue them.

Re:I wish I could get in on this

[t0rnt0pieces]

If you live in states with anti-spamming laws you may be able to sue the spammers. Not for millions of dollars however.

In Washington state we are allowed to sue for up to $500.00 per spam. However, the spammer must do something like give a false return address or misleading subject line.

Considering the amount of spam I get (sometimes hundreds per day, and I'm sure that's not an unusual amount), and the fact that 90%+ of them have fake return addresses, at $500 per spam I probably could sue for millions.

Re:I wish I could get in on this

[egburr]

No, it's a lot more ridiculous than saying that. Earthlink won a judgement. To do so, earthlink spent a lot of the customers' money on lawyers. To actually collect the money awarded in the judgement, Earthlink will have to spend more of the customers' money on lawyers, collectors, etc. If they get more money back than was spent on the process, I will be surprised.

So, spam does cost the recipient money, not only in terms of bandwidth, CPU time, storage, download time, frustration, irritation, etc., but also in all the unrecovered costs of prosecuting, persuing, and attempting to collect on the judgement. Customers may not directly pay for all of that, but their monthly rates reflect all those costs.

Re:I wish I could get in on this

[anthony_dipierro]

If they get more money back than was spent on the process, I will be surprised.

If they don't, then they shouldn't have sued in the first place.

Re:I wish I could get in on this

[Anonymous Coward]

(Oh c'mon, it's no more ridiculous than saying that spam costs the recipient money)

You must not have to deal with spam on a regular basis. I spend an hour of personal time dealing with spam (either deleting it or entering it into my filters), and a full third of my business day dealing with it - yes - three hours EVERY DAY.
That to me costs money.

Re:I wish I could get in on this

[Jeffv323]

In Washington state we are allowed to sue for up to $500.00 per spam.

Actually, it's not up to $500, but exactly $500, or actual damages - whichever is greater.

See here.

-- Jeff

Re:I wish I could get in on this

[Black Copter Control]

If they get more money back than was spent on the process, I will be surprised.
If they don't, then they shouldn't have sued in the first place.

Monetary awards are not the only reason for suing somebody (although going into court without a monetary interest can confuse the best of judges..). Here in BC there are many cases of companies going to court go get injunctions against protestors, etc. Although the injunctions are nominally interlocutory (until the case properly goes to court), they often stop prosecuting the case after the injunction is granted (i.e. the injunction is the only reason why they filed the injunction. I was actually surprised to find that they actually proceeded with one of these cases and got a ($6000) award.

Although they seem to have little hope of collecting on the $16M award, the fact that they can have these people arrested for violating the injunction can probably save them thousands of dollars in human an hardware costs.

Re:I wish I could get in on this

[Anonymous Coward]

I probably could sue for millions.

You bet I would like to sue those bastards myself. But the case is that not all the spam you get is from a single entity. If you get a 100 spams a day, like in my case 15 % of the spam is from the same person, the rest from others. You'd probably have to collect a lot of spams to sue for a few million... I digress.. pardon me.

Re:I wish I could get in on this

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell do you spend 3 hours a day doing with spam? Even if it takes a full 5 seconds to identify a spam, and 10 to enter it into a filter, you could process 720 spams in 3 hours, and that would be 720 that /passed/ your carefully-maintained filter.

Re:I wish I could get in on this

[Anonymous Coward]

An email system for 2,400 people.
Yes, I've been given the task of reviewing all our users sandboxed email.
I'm the final plonk.

Re:I wish I could get in on this

[sixdotoh]

how exactly do you, could you, measure damages?

Re:I wish I could get in on this

[rodgerd]

Server goes down under a welter of spam, you lose a contract because email doesn't arrive. Or you spend hundreds on weekend work for someone to clean a system up. Trivial examples.

Re:I wish I could get in on this

[Anonymous Coward]

This is disgusting.

I signed up with Earthlink. The next day I went on the web and set my account prefs to maximum privacy. Then, the first time I configured by mail reader and tested e-mail, before I had given my new email address to anyone, I had spam waiting for me (and this was not common-name-lucky-guess either).

For Earthlink to pretend they are concerned with spam, after they gave my address to spammers is fraudulent.

Re:I wish I could get in on this

[Kryptkrwlr_XTC]

Earthlink is not getting a penny, I live in Buffalo, NY (the home and base of operations of Carmack). Our Hometown News station went to his CRAPPY APARTMENT above his parents house yesterday. He lives in a pretty bad part of town, which isnot so strange since most of Buffalo is a "bad part of town". He definately wasn't making the big bucks.

Re:I wish I could get in on this

[Overt Coward]

Does "misleading" include Spam headers like "re: Blah, Blah, Blah", where they try to make it look like a response to a request you made for their "services"? Those are the ones that annoy me the most -- I know who I've sent email to.. and it ain't them!

Just below that on the annoyance scale is any subject line that refers to me as "Friend" -- that ought to be "misleading" regardless of content because if they're spamming me, then I am certainly not their friend!

Re:I wish I could get in on this

[anthony_dipierro]

I spend an hour of personal time dealing with spam (either deleting it or entering it into my filters), and a full third of my business day dealing with it - yes - three hours EVERY DAY.

You should probably come up with a better solution, now, shouldn't you?

Re:I wish I could get in on this

[anthony_dipierro]

Monetary awards are not the only reason for suing somebody (although going into court without a monetary interest can confuse the best of judges..).

But making or saving money is the only reason for a corporation to sue somebody.

Re:I wish I could get in on this

[yog]

There was a pretty good article about this on the front page of the Wall Street Journal yesterday. (You may need to be a subscriber to access this link). Anyway, he created at least 343 Earthlink accounts and every one of them was based on a stolen identity (credit card, bank account information). That's the part I find amazing. Isn't fraudulent use of other people's credit card numbers enough to put this guy in jail?

His grandmother thinks he's a nice guy:

...her grandson brings her breakfast from McDonald's when she asks. "He would do anything for me," she says.

Mrs. Carmack said she doesn't know what her grandson does for work. She didn't know anything about a lawsuit, she said, but it sounded "real sad." She added, "Maybe if they got jobs for the fellows, they wouldn't have to do this."

Indeed.

Re:I wish I could get in on this

[Black Copter Control]

But making or saving money is the only reason for a corporation to sue somebody.

Only if you believe that the only reason for a corporation to exist is to make money. This isn't true. Originally, corporations were created for the public good. Charters were granted to corporations only if they promised to do something positive, and the charter could be revoked if they violated their promise. Over time, this has been changed (I'm tempted to say 'perverted').

There are some coporations that exist to serve some other end. For those corporations, profit is simply a necesity to keep the coporation in existence. Volvo come to mind as a corporation which claims to be intent on providing the best cars possible -- with profit claimed to be a fallout from the intention.

A number of years ago, I actually worked for a registered non-profit corporation. It was fun when I made an application at a place that had different charge rates for commercial and non-profit organizations. (yes, I finally managed to get the non-profit rate).

Re:I wish I could get in on this

[anthony_dipierro]

Only if you believe that the only reason for a corporation to exist is to make money.

Of course it is. To do otherwise would be illegal, and the shareholders would sue.

Granted, I'm talking about a publically held corporation. I'm certainly not talking about a non-profit.

There are some coporations that exist to serve some other end. For those corporations, profit is simply a necesity to keep the coporation in existence. Volvo come to mind as a corporation which claims to be intent on providing the best cars possible -- with profit claimed to be a fallout from the intention.

I'd like to see the corporate charter for Volvo. Somehow I doubt it's mission is to provide the best cars possible. But hey, you live and learn.

Re:I wish I could get in on this

[Anonymous Coward]

The BIGGEST problem in the fight against spam is finding them. it is virtually impossible with our current infrastructure, here's why.

1) Open mail proxys - usually located in China, out of reach by US ISP's.

2) Now the spammers have somehow realized that people can contact them by digging up the "whois" on their domain, so they've been able to "falsify" these records. Dispite the fact this is against the AUP of the domain name issuers. If you should happen to find a false entry, it's encouraged you report to the issuer (which is listed in the "whois").

3) Tracking the mail path - Don't bother. ISP's have made that an impossibility with their strict privacy policy (A convenient wall for spammers to hide behind). Even if you can get them to cross check their logs, you'll usually wind up with the IP address of the Spam proxy (Usually located off-shore and out of reach anyway).

4) Follow the money trail - Usually the best way to find them. But this involves you actually purchasing that "penile enlargement thingie" from them, and checking your credit card statement. But this is as distasteful as eating a jar full of shit. Perhaps FEAR FACTOR might be interested in this... :-)

5) Follow the shipping trail - Once your order comes in the mail, look at the shipping invoice and see where it comes from. But even this is very difficult to track, because they hire shipping companies, which of course have "privacy policies" they can hide behind.

So, sueing spammers is going to take some serious investigation work to find them. I say, lots of luck, and if you DO come up with a sure fire way of finding spammers, please let us know, I have about 15,000,000 friends who would want to know.

If you're a back hat hacker, once you find the proxy, you can then take it out with a DDOS attack. I'm not one to encourage anyone to do anything illegal of course, but spammers need extra consideration. I mean, if they can go around and infect machines with their trojans (highly illegal), use your own morals.

And one really main reason why it's virtually impossible to catch them, is because there are all these Spam-trojans and tools out there, infecting machines on DSL or Cable modem. Just like DDOS attacks, many "zombie" machines can then work together, generating thousands of spams, without the owner's permissions, as their machines are secretly spewing out spam.

These programs DO generate specific siagnatures Snort can use to Log and detect the use of these. Once detected, an enterprising hacker can break into it, but you have to catch them "in the act", and be able to indentify these "signatures". So even if you can "hack into" these spammer machines, more then likely, you'll just break into a "zombie" machine.

It would take two steps to nail them. Step one, would be to catch a specific spam mail by using a snort rule to catch the content of a particular message you are looking for. Once that is found, you use the IP address from the IDS logs, then fingerprint the system. Once you know what it is (proxy, hijacked machine), then you can use a 2nd snort rule to nail down which spammer program they are using. This then confirms this is the spammer's machine.

I would venture to say that a large percentage of spam comes from "zombies" now. We have a large collection of signatures (after spending a lot of time analyzing spammer programs).

Anyway, if Hollywood can legally hack into a P2P network, why can't anti-spammers sabotage spammer's machines?

injunction

[petecarlson]

Does the injunction cover spam on other systems or just Earthlink? I guess I'll go read the article and get back to myself on that one...

Re:injunction

[silentbozo]

The injunction covers customers of all ISPs, or so according to the news article I read. The Wall Street Journal front column for May 7th has an excellent story on the lengths that Earthlink went to to dissuade this spammer from continuing, before finally resorting to tracking his ass down and suing him.

spammers?

[Anonymous Coward]

are they ever going to see the money from this settlement?

Re:spammers?

[Guppy06]

Probably not, but it's kinda hard to pay for a new ISP when nobody will give you a credit card.

Re:spammers?

[Black Copter Control]

are they ever going to see the money from this settlement?

On a $25M award, I'd be happy to go after these bastards for a simple 5% collector's fee.

((-: Would it be OK if I destroyed their business in the process?? :-)) [big evil grin]

Re:spammers?

[yog]

He was using stolen credit card/bank account information. Not clear if he was actually charging off those card or just using them to sign up with.

Re:spammers?

[wkitchen]

On a $25M award, I'd be happy to go after these bastards for a simple 5% collector's fee.

((-: Would it be OK if I destroyed their business in the process?? :-)) [big evil grin]

Ok, 10%.

This conversation never happenned.

Legal vs technical vs payperemail

[arete]

I used to believe that legal remedies couldn't stop things like spam, but I think I was wrong.

The very fact that spam is only a problem when it's on a large scale (don't think about recieving on a large scale, think that the list has to be large...) means, I think, that legal solutions can prevail.

arete

Re:Legal vs technical vs payperemail

[zrm8y5m02]

Legal solutions can prevail in US. The problem is that emails can be sent from a computer outside the US jurisdiction. Legal solutions may or may not work in other countries. -s.p.

Re:Legal vs technical vs payperemail

[Xtifr]

The problem is that emails can be sent from a computer outside the US jurisdiction.

The jurisdiction of the computer won't be an issue. The jurisdiction of the spammer is what will count. And being a non-US company is not necessarily much of a defense either: if you do business in the US, then you're potentially at-risk (see, e.g. US v. Elcomsoft), and can have your assets seized or possibly worse; contrariwise, if you don't do business in the US, then there's little point in spamming people in the US.

Anyway, the US isn't the only country considering anti-spam laws. If enough countries take an anti-spam stance, the rest may have to fall in line or risk being blocked completely.

Re:Legal vs technical vs payperemail

[zrm8y5m02]

> If enough countries take an anti-spam stance,
> the rest may have to fall in line or risk
> being blocked completely.

Right. So spam IS a global problem.

> if you don't do business in the US,
> then there's little point
> in spamming people in the US.

I think it's not that straightforward.
Suppose a foreign porn service company.
If they start sending spams to people in US,
I don't see how US court can affect them.
-s.p.

Re:Legal vs technical vs payperemail

[1u3hr]

I think it's not that straightforward. Suppose a foreign porn service company. If they start sending spams to people in US, I don't see how US court can affect them.

Unless they're giving away their porn, they want to you to pay for it. So they must have a merchant account with an American credit card company (unless they ask you to put dollar bills into an envelope and mail them). At a minimum, that account could be closed, probably any balance in it confiscated.

If you want to get money out of a country, you have to have some business relationship with a business entity in that country. (If you're a drug lord, of course you can courier wads of cash, gold, etc, but I'm talking about the small transactions here.)

Re:Legal vs technical vs payperemail

[Steve B]

I think what we need are technical solutions backed by force of law (e.g. deliberately bypassing anti-spam filters should be treated just like deliberately bypassing any other form of computer security).

Re:Legal vs technical vs payperemail

[Ryan Amos]

The thing about spam is that legal solutions CAN prevail because there is an enormous volume of spam but it comes from a very small number of people. A single spammer can easily sent 10 million e-mails a day. That means every court ruling has an effect on these guys. Companies don't often go looking to spam people, but when someone spams them "REACH 100 MILLION PEOPLE FOR $100" they're probably gonna bite. They see the potential for reward as being great and there really is no risk involved. Sue the spammers, maybe then they'll move on to real work.

Payment in Goods?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seeing as how these spammers probably DON'T have millions of dollars in the bank, and even Microsoft was able to negotiate for penalties being only in software, is Earthlink likely to get a truck load of $16M of penile enhancement cream and Nigerian banknotes in compensation?

Re:Payment in Goods?

[Jerf]

Perhaps they can settle for sixteen million dollars' worth of email addresses and bulk email solutions.

Re:Payment in Goods?

[JudgeFurious]

Or maybe the spammers can send them information on how they can refinance their mortgages to save Earthlink employees 16Mil in interest or something creative like that.

I think Earthlink should hold out for the settlement that gives them $16Mil in generic viagra though. They might be able to turn those into cash. All they would need to do is send a few emails to each of their customers telling them about the fantastic results they could get....

Any relation?

[dido]

Wonder if this spammer has any relation to good 'ol John. ;)

Re:Any relation?

[gmuslera]

Maybe what you want to do to spammers? Is a BFG9000 enough?

About as much chance as...

[Spittles]

"A few more of these, and maybe the tide of spam will eb." Yeah.. and maybe if the RIAA sues the pantaloons off a few more University students, people will be wracked with guilt and delete their collection of MP3's. Maybe. Nah.

Re:About as much chance as...

[arkhan_jg]

There are several differences as to why the threat of (and actual) legal action can be more effective against spammers. First, there aren't very many spammers. Most estimates put most spam to be coming from a few hundred US based spammers, bouncing off worldwide open relays. Bankrupt or imprison them for the various laws they break, not least fraud and deception, and the flood of spam worldwide would become a trickle, and much of that would be nigerian. (don't know about you, but the nigerian scam is only a tiny, tiny percentage of my inbox) This is an entirely different proposition from trying to nail the millions of P2P users. Most P2P users can legimately think that the chances of them getting caught are still pretty remote, especially if they live outside the US. Second, spammers are very very reviled people by anybody who uses email. Just look at what happens to their postbag when their address is known. Thus people will actively co-operate in nailing them, and most big businesses have an interest in getting rid of spammers, even if only to give their legit (optin) direct marketing campaigns a chance of getting eyes on. Again, this is different to P2P, where you're pretty unlikely to be hunted down and attacked at every opportunity. Finally, there are a lot of people trying to ease the draconian grip the record industry have upon our cultural heritage. Whether those efforts will succeed or not is unknown, but it is plain that these businesses need to adapt to the changes in customer preferences. Apple's service is only the start. The only way the spammers can alter their business model is to stop doing what they do, or at the very least, clean up their act and stick to genuine optin marketing. No more porn spam to children, no more herbal viagra, and definitely no more fecking .NET messenger spam (yes, definitely .NET messenger, i'm running kopete on linux!) Either way, we win. And I have to say, it's about time corporate america started using their big bucks and 'most money wins' legal system to do something for the overall good, even if that is only a side benefit to them.

A real jerk

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

This guy used his relative's info for setting up accounts. When Earthlink talked to his 58 year old retired uncle, they figured out what was going on when he mentioned a nephew that works at home w/ computers. (I read the Wall Street Journal. Headline news!)

Re:A real jerk

[Dr. Smeegee]

Can you provide a link to that story on wsj.com? I cannot find it.

Re:A real jerk

[Steve B]

None of the phone numbers listed in the spams he is alleged to have sent are listed in his name. One was in his mother's name. Another in the name of his mentally handicapped brother who lived in a nearby assisted-living home.

This guy is a real piece of... work.

Re:A real jerk

[Ryan Amos]

Most spammers are the kind of people who are looking for get rich quick schemes.. Regardless of if they're totally legal. Ten years ago they would have had some confidence scheme, now it's spam cos it's quasi-legal and easy.

Awards vs. Injunction

[sssmashy]

Last year the company was awarded $25 million in damages in a suit against another big junk e-mailer, Kahn C. Smith of Tennessee. Youngblood said the company hasn't collected that award. But the monetary award, Wellborn said, is less of a victory than the injunction.

Nobody will ever collect civil damages from a spammer, because the vast majority of spam does not come from legitimate companies with assets. Most spammers tend to be individuals: low-rent sleazebags with bad credit and a history of illegal or borderline illegal activities. If they actually had millions of dollars they wouldn't stoop to spamming.

The injunction is a good thing because if one of these lowlifes tries spamming again, they can throw him in jail.

Re:Awards vs. Injunction

[gary bernhardt]

Generalizations like this do *not* further the anti-spam cause. Spam is most definitely an area where very large financial gain is possible. This obviously precludes spammers being "low-rent" sleezebags.

This reminds me of the thousands of posts over the years on Slashdot asking "Why does anyone spam? Noone buys that stuff." Then about a year ago a story gets posted showing someone who made *millions* spamming, and everyone stopped discussing it as if it had never happened.

Randomly assigning adjectives to someone you view as an opponent will not help your position. All it will do is make you look like someone who blindly slings insults, without giving any thought to the situation.

Re:Awards vs. Injunction

[anthony_dipierro]

The injunction is a good thing because if one of these lowlifes tries spamming again, they can throw him in jail.

You mean this guy was using stolen credit card numbers and identities and he's not in jail already?

Re:Awards vs. Injunction

[datavortex]

Sorry, but in this case unfortunately the generalization is correct. That's pretty much how it's played out I'm afraid. There's only a couple spammers like Milette and he's more clever (and able to find scumbag salespeople at desperate bandwith providers) than many would like to admit.

Re:Awards vs. Injunction

[evilviper]

the vast majority of spam does not come from legitimate companies with assets. Most spammers tend to be individuals:

Perhaps, but they do make a good deal of money (not enough to pay $16 mil.), but there would be no point in spam if it wasn't done on behalf of a company...

Of course, if the spammer/company is outside US jurisdiction, you may have a hard time collecting, but you'd certainly seriously cut down on the volume of spam if you put an end to all of it in the US.

Re:Awards vs. Injunction

[Galvatron]

As I recall, the guy who made millions WAS a "low rent sleazebag" with a poor credit history. He's made lots from spamming, but if that job were taken away, most likely he'd crawl back into his hole.

Re:Awards vs. Injunction

[dubl-u]

Spam is most definitely an area where very large financial gain is possible. This obviously precludes spammers being "low-rent" sleezebags.

Even if somebody lives in a high-rent place, they can be a low-rent sleazebag. Hollywood is full of them, for example. And that the gain is possible doesn't mean that all spammers get it; the spammers I've taken the time to track down and talk to have often made very little from it.

Generalizations like this do *not* further the anti-spam cause.

Well, actually, they do, especially when they're true. It makes it much easier from a PR and lobbying perspective to be able to say paint spammers as beyond the pale.

I recently chatted with a fellow who's in the on-line porn industry. Although he doesn't spam, he knows a number of spammers. He seemed quite convinced that they were sleazebags. I've met a few myself, and all of them, excepting the once who were just plain clueless, were all sleazebags.

And all the ones I've seen profiled in the press were pathetic excuses for human beings, too. Like the guy in Minnesota, who previously was a cop. Until he got busted for selling drugs to children, that is.

So if you know some spammers who are smart, upstanding, concerned citizens, hey, share the details with us. I'd be fascinated to find once who is a vegan pacifist buddhist. No, scratch that, I'd be fucking floored.

Re:Awards vs. Injunction

[e-gold]

You mean this guy was using stolen credit card numbers and identities and he's not in jail already?

That's what I used to say. Apparently, we have more important uses for our jails (peaceful patients like Steve Kubby, who made the mistake of speaking out about the tax-and-spend drugwar, come to mind...) I sure wish that actual crooks (who also happen to be spammers) start getting put in cages. This guy would be a good start. Jail is a judgment we can ALL collect, in his case.
JMR

speaking ONLY for myself (which is part of the problem)

Re:Awards vs. Injunction

[Anonymous Coward]

This reminds me of the thousands of posts over the years on Slashdot asking "Why does anyone spam? Noone buys that stuff." Then about a year ago a story gets posted showing someone who made *millions* spamming, and everyone stopped discussing it as if it had never happened.

Methinks you have a selective memory.

I recall the question being "why do people believe that spam works?"

And you have your answer: because scumbag spammers tell people it works - and they're the ones that make "millions".. because people belive them, and pay the spammers to send spam.

Re:Awards vs. Injunction

[jellomizer]

Well these is a sucker born every minute so...

#!/usr/bin/python
import time
print time.time()/60

So as of right now there is 17,540,006 suckers sience 1970

Re:Awards vs. Injunction

[royalblue_tom]

However, according to most anti-spam sites, it's the top ten or so "clever" spammers who send approximately 90% of all the spam. These are the guys that have the expensive houses and the money.

Re:Awards vs. Injunction

[anthony_dipierro]

Actually I'd personally say it's the credit card company and Earthlink's problem. They should get a better authentication system. Why hassle the taxpayer with paying to solve what is essentially a monetary issue? But that's just my crazy opinion.

Re:Awards vs. Injunction

[royalblue_tom]

Make this the top ~180 (and kudos to the spamhaus guys).

Re:Awards vs. Injunction

[datavortex]

You might be surprised about how many of those 180 that are based in the US live closer to the poverty line than you might imagine. For example we estimate than Khan Smith had an annual income resultant from his online fraud of 32K. He may also have had a narcotics business, but most spammers do not.

the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

the problem of course is that all the spammers will just move overseas, where US law won't hurt them and they are ignored by local government.

Re:the problem

[www.sorehands.com]

Overseas????

If you mean that they will use overseas servers, that won't help the spammers. If they are in the USA, you can get them in the USA. You can actually sue an overseas spammer here, but it may be hard to collect.

If you are talking of spammers overseas. You can go after a spammer overseas, but it is harder to do and to collect from.

We can also go after the people that hire them.

Re:the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

"the problem of course is that all the spammers will just move overseas, where US law won't hurt them"

Hmm. I think I know what to do with all our nuclear weapons now!

Re:the problem

[DaveAtFraud]

The main thing these rulings do is establish that the sender doesn't have a constitutional right to spam. Spamers and telemarketers both attack any sort of limits on their behavior as a limitation of "free speech." By finding that spamming is not constitutionally protected free speech, ISPs can apply remedies on their end of the wire and not be afraid they'll get sued.

For large ISPs, (Earthlink, AOL, etc.), detecting spam isn't that hard using blaclists, forbidding address spoofing, etc. They even have the financial incentive to do it since this junk takes up a goodly chunk of disk space and ticks off customers. Then think about how much worse the odds get for a spammer if they can't send to any AOL, Earthlink, Hotmail or Yahoo Mail accounts.

Re:the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

OK. So we black list thier countries!

Huh?

[Evil Adrian]

They say injunction.

I say injection.

This is what is needed...

[Eric Damron]

Hitting spammers in their pocket books is the only thing that will stop them. The awards must exceed the amount that they make though spamming.

Earthlink should not allow these spammers not to pay either. They need to take everything the spammer owns. Don't even leave them a bucket to piss into.

Re:This is what is needed...

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

I dunno. A 12-guage shotgun blast to the face would stop one pretty good.

(that's meant as a joke, folks, go ahead and take those two or three big points of karma away for trolling anyway though, I'm sure it'll really hurt me)

I like the idea of financialy annihilating them though. I like that alot. facial tatooes of "I'm a spamming piece of shit. I wasted your money and the money of your children. Please punch me in the face until I pass out and spit teeth into the gutter" would be acceptable as well.

Re:This is what is needed...

[Blaine Hilton]

They will probably get off scoot free though with structures such as LLCs and corporations. Some times justice is hard to find...

Re:This is what is needed...

[Spetiam]

Hitting them in the head might work, too. Not that it's an option, but it might work.

Re:This is what is needed...

[Steve B]

I dunno. A 12-guage shotgun blast to the face would stop one pretty good.

I honestly don't know why this hasn't happened. When you routinely piss off millions of people, you're bound to catch a few cases of six-sigma-below-mu on the anger management scale.

Re:This is what is needed...

[kubrick]

go ahead and take those two or three big points of karma

I don't know, I was thinking it was more +1, Cathartic.

AOL

[oaf357]

A few more of these, and maybe the tide of spam will eb. Maybe. Nah.

That would require AOL to do something.

Re:AOL

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a rural cable ISP. Every week we get several complaints from AOL about spam originating from IP addresses we own. We find them in our dhcp logs, and bonk! no internet for you.

Re:AOL

[Anonymous Coward]

AOL is about to do something about it. They are getting together with Microsoft and a couple other companies to overcome the current state of spam. I thought I read this here, maybye it was somewhere else.

Re:AOL

[oaf357]

AOL has been about to do something for quite some time.

stolen identies/cc #'s

[Pootie Tang]

Carmack and others kept the bulk e-mail flowing through Internet accounts opened with stolen identities and credit card numbers.

Considering this and the fact that he didn't even show up to defend himself in court, why bother obeying the injuction? They don't arrest people for this stuff anymore?

Obviously Earthlink isn't going to get $16 mil out of this. I take it verizon didn't collect on their $6.9 million judgement either.

Re:stolen identies/cc #'s

[Anonymous Coward]

If you were a police officer and someone said you had the chance to put a spammer in the slammer wouldn't you jump at the chance!

Re:stolen identies/cc #'s

[poot_rootbeer]

The spammer can just put the $16 million charge on the stolen credit cards he used. Problem solved!

What about spammers with foreign servers?

[Seth Able]

These rulings are against spammers sending mail through Earthlink's servers, right? Can the same logic be used against American spammers using foreign servers to push mail onto Earthlink (or others) servers?

IANAL...

Seth

Re:What about spammers with foreign servers?

[Anonymous Coward]

gimme a call at 39827168971209487609137409673917629037629083576920 75629075369749-16794239014797461294867190234679023 48671924307619824760192347619032671903247619034769 18469013769073979430791432791324794123769476190248 67190234673947693467901347698107690147861903246710 9823761903476198037619034760918349137 we can chat about spam mail

Re:What about spammers with foreign servers?

[Anonymous Coward]

EarthLink, the nation's third-largest Internet service provider, said Carmack and others kept the bulk e-mail flowing through Internet accounts opened with stolen identities and credit card numbers.

No, the same logic can't be used.

Re:What about spammers with foreign servers?

[Seth Able]

Did they get nailed for the CC fraud or for illigal/unauthorized use of the servers? From what I read, the later is what won Earthlink the money. I imagine the CC will be another Federal matter, won't it?

Seth

Re:What about spammers with foreign servers?

[AndroidCat]

Sure. Even if they use foreign servers, if they are in the US, they can be nailed. Almost all spammers eventually want to get your money, so they have to leave a trail of breadcrumbs that leads right to their door. (The exception is the pump'n'dump stock spammers.)

I love the judge's name

[Anonymous Coward]

Thrash... who could ask for a better name than that! That spammer certainly got a financial "thrashing".

Solution or a bigger problem

[failedlogic]

I've looked up our friend Mr. Ralsky on spamhaus and it would seem he's probably not paid anything yet in damages. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/2002- 10-29-spam-suit_x.htm http://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/search.lasso?evidenc efile=1290 Further it would seem he has enough money to hire lawyers to appeal convictions and the other normal legal ramblings which take forever to settle lawsuits. Won't this suit/injuction simply be more of the same?

Re:Solution or a bigger problem

[NeMon'ess]

If he was going to drag this out I think he should have started by appearing in court so his lawyer could file all kinds of motions to delay. Starting now won't buy as much time as if he started early.

erm...

[2MuchC0ffeeMan]

wait, i have earthlink, do i get a piece of that pie? how many users does earthlink have? 10 milion? good, that's like a buck twenty i should get off my next bill.

Re:erm...

[Anonymous Coward]

i used to make earthlink accts with fake credit cards from other countries (the prefix would point to a bank outside usa they would confirm the cecksum but not the status of the acct or name attached)

most of them are still active i think, haven't checked since i turned 18

so some of those 10million customers are me or someone that did the same thing

can i have a dollar for each acct i made?

Re:Everybody IM "chinbot5000" (AIM)

[Anonymous Coward]

it's harry potter (no joke)

Wait for the appeal

[Anonymous Coward]

In the courtroom of that famous Native American, Judge HorseFuck.

Re:"Huh?" is right

[Anonymous Coward]

I have NO idea what that meant.

I don't understand

[theirpuppet]

If Earthlink, and company, have been doing side deals with spammers for years, and some people have the documentation to prove it, why isn't there a class action lawsuit or something. Lately, in the interest of customer appeasement, brand recognition, and some more advertising many companies like Earthlink have been suing spammers, except we all know they'll never get any money. They already got their money from the 'secret deals'. They are now flaunting their 'respectability' and 'anti spamness', and this should be more reason to applaud them for their legitimate efforts and penalize them for their shady dealings.

I'll never understand why people accept apathy. I know the reasons, but they still get on my nerves.

Re:I don't understand

[techno-vampire]

I worked for Earthlink for almost seven and a half years, until the Pasadena Call Center was closed. Earthlink has never made "side deals" with spammers or let them get away with anything. Earthlink has probably done more to get rid of spammers than any other ISP. Five years ago, when spam was a much smaller issue, Earthlink sued Spamford Wallace for Theft of Service, forcing him to stop using Earthlink SMTP servers without permission. Frankly, I'm astonished that the moderators haven't marked you as the trolling flamebait you are.

Rest of the Universe

[OneArmedMan]

A few more victories and we might be able to see the rest of the Universe a lot sooner than I expected. Black Hole

Re:"Huh?" is right

[adpowers]

I assume he means lethal.

Death of a spammer

[Animats]

As I've mentioned previously, we had a problem with a spammer forging our Downside(tm) return address, resulting in over 16,000 mail bounces. It's been a headache, but all 24 of his "extreme rape" web sites, plus his billing sites, are now off the net.

Originally, he was buying hosting from several US ISPs, including Rackspace. We asked the ISPs to identify the site owner, as required by law (because he accepts credit cards) and when they found they didn't have good info on him, they killed his accounts. He was using about five ISPs at a time, and had his own DNS server so that he could quickly switch from one ISP to another as he was kicked off. The spam itself went out via open Telnet proxies. Whois info is plausible, but fake.

This seemed like a big-time operator, but over time, a different picture emerged. It became clear that this guy's business isn't porno. It's collecting credit card numbers. The porno sites were very shallow. ISP operators told us they were typically $5/month hosting sites with maybe 1MB of content. Some of the web sites were purchased with bad credit card numbers.

This guy kept coming back, typically buying bottom-level hosting through resellers. He tried a hosting service in Mayalasia and got kicked off. He tried one in Brazil and got kicked off. He tried a "bulk friendly" ISP in the US and got kicked off. Finally, he ended up with everything on a server in St. Petersburg, Russia. It took a few days, but he's been kicked off there, too.

We have some hints of who he is. We've spoken to some people he's dealt with. When we get a solid ID, we'll go after him for trademark infringement.

It's possible to win these things. It's time consuming, but persist. Trace where the money goes, not where the spam comes from. Follow up daily. Half an hour a day keeps the spammers away.

Re:Death of a spammer

[Anonymous Coward]

Get him.

Look, you won't get medals or money, but you will do something to make the world a more civilized place.

That counts for something.

Re:Death of a spammer

[Anonymous Coward]

Good post. Thank you for going after this guy and being persistent.

Re:Death of a spammer

[yamla]

I'm curious, were you able to get any help at all from Rackspace? I haven't ever had an experience like yours (thank God), but I did find for a time that about 90% of my spam was coming from Rackspace. All attempts to contact them (and I _didn't_ just try abuse@rackspace.com) led to nothing and I ended up having to ban their entire domain and all the IPs they control from connecting to my server and the servers I was administrating. I guess I just determined that Rackspace was quite happy to host known-spammers (and checking my logs, they still are), but perhaps your experience was different?

Re:Death of a spammer

[Sycraft-fu]

Something to try, that's Iv'e resorted to (not for spam, but for other network abuse) is to start up with the threats about upstream providers. Unless you are talking to someone huge like AT&T or Leve-3 or something, everyone has an upstream provider (or more than one). Find out who that is and get in touch, let the people you are trying to deal with know that you are doing this. Like the orignal poster said, persistence is the key. Don't give up because you get shrugged off, keep comming at it, esclating it, working on it.

This is true of many things when you are dealing with a stubborn party. Like when my DSL started acting up. It is telco provided DSL so most people would be quick to say "good luck". Well it took a long time, lots of hours with different tech support division, but finally I did convince them it was their problem, and they fixed it. However the key was not giving up, I had to keep trying.

Re:Death of a spammer

[jaa]

We asked the ISPs to identify the site owner, as required by law (because he accepts credit cards)

Can you explain this a bit further? I'd like to be able to use that approach myself when applicable, but I'm not sure exactly what you are saying here, and what law you are referring to.

Re:Death of a spammer

[Animats]

California Business and Professions Code section 17538.

(d) A vendor conducting business through the Internet or any other electronic means of communication shall do all of the following when the transaction involves a buyer located in this state:

• (1) Before accepting any payment or processing any debit or credit charge or funds transfer, the vendor shall disclose to the buyer in writing or by electronic means of communication, such as e-mail or an on-screen notice, the vendor's return and refund policy, the legal name under which the business is conducted and, except as provided in paragraph (3), the complete street address from which the business is actually conducted.
• (2) If the disclosure of the vendor's legal name and address information required by this subdivision is made by on-screen notice, all of the following shall apply: (A) The disclosure of the legal name and address information shall appear on any of the following: (i) the first screen displayed when the vendor's electronic site is accessed, (ii) on the screen on which goods or services are first offered, (iii) on the screen on which a buyer may place the order for goods or services, (iv) on the screen on which the buyer may enter payment information, such as a credit card account number, or (v) for nonbrowser-based technologies, in a manner that gives the user a reasonable opportunity to review that information. The communication of that disclosure shall not be structured to be smaller or less legible than the text of the offer of the goods or services. (B) The disclosure of the legal name and address information shall be accompanied by an adjacent statement describing how the buyer may receive the information at the buyer's e-mail address. The vendor shall provide the disclosure information to the buyer at the buyer's e-mail address within five days of receiving the buyer's request. (C) Until the vendor complies with subdivision (a) in connection with all buyers of the vendor's goods or services, the vendor shall make available to a buyer and any person or entity who may enforce this section pursuant to Section 17535 on-screen access to the information required to be disclosed under this subdivision.
• (3) The complete street address need not be disclosed as required by paragraph (1) if the vendor utilizes a private mailbox receiving service and all of the following conditions are met: (A) the vendor satisfies the conditions described in paragraph (2) of subdivision (b) of Section 17538.5, (B) the vendor discloses the actual street address of the private mailbox receiving service in the manner prescribed by this subdivision for the disclosure of the vendor's actual street address, and (C) the vendor and the private mailbox receiving service comply with all of the requirements of subdivisions (c) to (f), inclusive, of Section 17538.5.

...
(g) Any violation of the provisions of this section is a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment in the county jail not exceeding six months, by a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars ($1,000), or by both that imprisonment and fine.

This is very straightforward. No ambiguity here. Accept a credit card number on the Internet from someone in California without first providing real contact info, go to jail.

This is enough to get you talking to an ISP's management levels or their legal department, rather than the abuse department. From there, progress is usually rapid.

Re:Death of a spammer

[AndroidCat]

He'll get plenty of offers a free beer from around the world. (We need a service like BeerPal so that virtual beer payments can be shipped. There is a BeerPal but they just do beer rating.)

Re:Death of a spammer

[Tarrio]

I'm currently having this problem. It's a spammer who's currently using two of my domains in the From: field of his spam. He's sending all his scum to Russia. I already got him kicked from a Brazilian ISP, but I'm currently receiving my fourth wave of rejected messages in three weeks... :(

Re:Death of a spammer

[Anonymous Coward]

That's very nice, but is it enforceable for someone spamming from a different State ?
If the vendor server is actually located outside California, isn't the home State law that apply ? Otherwise, how conflicting laws between the vendor state and the client state are resolved, if any ?

Re:Death of a spammer

[EvilStein]

I actually had a *Rackspace employee* spam me. Here is the story.

They eventually wrote back and said "Sorry." The entire event was rather entertaining, to say the least. heh.

Re:Death of a spammer

[Anonymous Coward]

So - what you are saying, is that if they pay for their internet, the ISP is required to release that information? I tried that - but if you ever sort out or find him, I certainly want to know, and if you Email me with subject "Amimates", you'll get through the strict filters... lists at webcrunchers.com is the Email to use. I can give you some really good tips on how to find who he is. I'm pretty good at tracking these buggers down.

Re:"Huh?" is right

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, just get them really really high - pretty soon they'll all be reduced to turning tricks in the park for their next hit.

This is way too hard

[ChrisWong]

The WSJ article today goes into some detail about the arduous chase with little pay-off. Earthlink must have some really dedicated anti-spam activists to even try this. Think they are getting big bucks? Hardly. From the WSJ:

The lawsuits rarely collect payments because most spammers don't have much money. Last year, EarthLink won one of the industry's biggest settlements -- a $25 million judgment against a Tennessee spammer, but it hasn't yet collected a cent. The Federal Trade Commission has brought 48 actions against spammers who make false claims about products or identities, but it hasn't recovered much money either. "Many times, there is no money left," says Brian Huseman, staff attorney at the FTC.

And it involves a lot of grunt work per spammer. How much is your time worth? It's like "The Cuckoo's Egg" story again. For just this one guy, for example:

The pursuit of the Buffalo spammer became Ms. Youngblood's top priority early last year. She spent about 10 hours a week on the case, and her employees spent another 10 to 20 hours a week, in total, hunting to see where he was hiding on the network.

Unless we start seeing some high-profile jail time, there won't be much of a victory.

Re:This is way too hard

[minas-beede]

And it involves a lot of grunt work per spammer.

Who are the spammers in the Tulsa, OK area? I've got some pretty good evidence against someone there. Wasn't much work at all. I received a relay test message from him, I delivered it, now spam is arriving that (so sorry, Mr. Spammer) isn't getting delivered. Over 5000 recipients so far. The spam comes to my fake open realy through open proxy systems.

He's sending the relay tests from:

adsl-65-70-89-125.dsl.tulsok.swbell.net

He spams:

Subject: FWD: ASSET - BACKGROUND - MISSING PERSON SEARCHES..
Subject: FWD: BACKGROUND & ASSET SEARCHES - SAME DAY!
Subject: Fwd: background & asset reports - same day..
Subject: WE FIND MISSING PERSONS FOR YOU...OR NO CHARGE..
Subject: Re: WE FIND MISSING PERSONS FOR YOU...OR NO CHARGE!
Subject: Re: BACKGROUND & ASSET REPORTS - SAME DAY"
Subject: Re: background checks - same day service!
Subject: ASSET SEARCHES - SAME DAY SERVICE.
Subject: Re: BACKGROUND & ASSET SEARCHES - NATIONWIDE SEARCHES'

with this phone number for the marks to call: 1-877-269-3892

His relay test message went to timsmith777@connectfree.co.UK

He's been sending tests from that same IP for quite some time so I think it's the spammers IP, not an open proxy.

Re:This is way too hard

[TheLoneDanger]

They may not be getting money from prosecuting these guys, but as the article says:

"But the monetary award, Wellborn said, is less of a victory than the injunction."

The spammers take up bandwith and this guy was using stolen credit card numbers for his accounts. Maybe if the costs and damage to the reputations of large companies gets high enough, there'll be changes that make it easier to stop and penalize spammers.

Re:This is way too hard

[Anonymous Coward]

One word. Whackem.

Re:This is way too hard

[Ryan Amos]

Yes, but for every high profile victory like this, other people get scared off and don't send spam. They don't need to collect the money, less spam will lower their bandwidth costs and make their customers happier. EarthLink had an ad campaign a while back explicitly hawking their spam-blockers and popup-blockers. They're obviously trying to make the internet a less harrowing experience, and if it helps them keep customers, kudos to them.

Let's have the DEATH PENALTY for spamming

[dilute]

I can only think of a few crimes that merit the death penalty, and spamming is one of them.

Other crimes that definitely merit death include:

-- Serving popup ads

-- Peeing in the alley behind my apartment building (dogs get clemency)

-- Sending emails without subject lines

Re:Let's have the DEATH PENALTY for spamming

[pair-a-noyd]

Amen brother!

Let's try this option first though,
First offense, chop off BOTH of their hands.
Second offense, string em up!!

End of spam problem.
Within 3 months spam will be a historical note...

Re:Let's have the DEATH PENALTY for spamming

[Anonymous Coward]

But I had been drinking all night long and reeeeeeeaaaaaallllly had to go bad. Can you forgive me?

Re:Linux and Apache

[Anonymous Coward]

Knoppix, motherfucker.

ha HA!

[Anonymous Coward]

San Francisco has no public urination laws.
I piss on everything! Hope you don't live here

Why isn't he in jail?

[runchbox]

The WSJ article said he'd used 350 stolen identities and credit cards to set up accounts. We've got the laws we need to put people in jail for credit card fraud -- so why is he at home avoiding phone calls?

Re:Why isn't he in jail?

[silentbozo]

A WSJ article from last month says it all. Basically, the credit card companies aren't interested in prosecuting fraud because they pass the costs directly to the merchant to accepted the card (with extra penalties to boot.) If you (as the merchant, or the customer) try to get the credit card company to follow up on a fraud attempt, they'll just ignore you. As a consequence, identity theft goes unpunished, customers are lulled into a false sense of security (oh, we'll just deactivate your old card and issue you a new one), and merchants get a lossage rate of up to 2% when accepting credit cards for card not present transactions...

Besides, for criminal cases, you need a prosecutor to file a case. Unless the amount is above a certain number, they'll typically just ignore you.

At ~.02 per spam, that's still a bargain

[BreadMan]

Without knowing what he charged his customers, his fine doesn't seem all that large.

I think it's about time ISP's started charging for each e-mail both sent and received, somewhat like stamps. Something tells me the elasticity looks very vertical in this market and a small cost will do wonders for reducing spam.

Re:At ~.02 per spam, that's still a bargain

[interiot]

• I think it's about time ISP's started charging for each e-mail both sent and received

I don't think that's the best approach. It's artificially raising the price of a very basic service. While individual users might not mind paying 100 cents more a month, Amazon sure would be upset if it had to stop its confirmation emails, or pass that cost on to the consumer. All these companies operating slightly less efficiently ends up being a small drag on our economy.

And what's to stop us at charging extra for email? Why not http since so many unsolicited ads get sent over that? Or usenet? While SMTP may be the big pain right now, who's to say that the scum won't move to a different (free) protocol in response?

Re:At ~.02 per spam, that's still a bargain

[kien]

I think it's about time ISP's started charging for each e-mail both sent and received, somewhat like stamps. Something tells me the elasticity looks very vertical in this market and a small cost will do wonders for reducing spam.

True, but the side-effect would also be the death of legitimate mailing lists. I like to read Politech and I like it that /. can notify about replies and mods. I'm more willing to suffer with spam for those benefits than I would be to pay for every email I send while losing all of my legitimate, requested email services.

--K.

Re:At ~.02 per spam, that's still a bargain

[Bartmoss]

How foolish. That just means they will relay their mail through china. What do you want to do, charge connections on port 25? So they'll use another port. What's the point? Thi sjust does not work.

Re:At ~.02 per spam, that's still a bargain

[BreadMan]

Good point!

You'd get less junk mail in your mailbox, so you'd spend less time and $ dealing with unwanted mail. Would this balance out against the drag introduced because it was no longer as inexpensive to send out legitimate messages? Maybe. I don't know. :-)

I agree that this would give rise to other, less costly alternatives and that's a bummer. We're really working agsinst the notion that advertising can be performed at a nearly 0 cost. If your business model works this way, you'll work hard to find the next nearly free way to advertise.

Re:At ~.02 per spam, that's still a bargain

[kavau]

I think it's about time ISP's started charging for each e-mail both sent and received, somewhat like stamps.

Charge for each email received? Doesn't that hurt the wrong people? I understand how charging a tiny amount for each email sent would alleviate the spam problem, but wouldn't charging the receiver just make matters worse?

Post link please...

[jtheory]

Wait, what's this about side deals? Are you talking reality here or conspiracy theories? Obviously shady dealings happen in the corporate world all the time, but that doesn't mean we can assume w/o solid evidence.

__

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with e-mails without a subject?

SPAM? What's that?

[tony1c]

I'm starting to believe that the SPAM problem is more of an educational issue now. I've used two different programs that have been highly effective against SPAM (spamnet and POPFile). I use POPFile exclusively now, and I've almost forgotten what SPAM is. Yes, it's still a major problem for users out there (especially those using web-based clients), but there is highly effective technology out there to counter it. We don't need to launch costly and ungainly legal offensives against spammers - we already have software that can render them irrelevant.

Checking my Wall Street Journal

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

I noted earlier this asshole used his uncle's info in setting up Earthlink accounts. He also used his mother's name and his mentally-handicapped brother's name. These mistakes and his persistence in using Earthlink as his only ISP cost him quite a bit.

Re:Checking my Wall Street Journal

[Anonymous Coward]

Hang on...his BROTHER is the mantally-handicapped one...?

Re:Checking my Wall Street Journal

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

It seems to run in the family :)

The money should go to the victims of SPAM

[Hao Wu]

The moneys should go to the victims of SPAM. Earthlink should take the 16 million dollar prize, divite it by it's members or whatever, and then give cash to the people who hate SPAM.

Speaking from personal experience

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking from a front line position in certain corporations *coughs* phone monkey *coughs* in no way represents any corporations opinion (just what I see at the job)

I'd say besides connection issues...

Spam and pop ups tend to be the most irritating thing about the internet to those unfamiliar with it in general... I'm quite sure it's caused plenty of customers to cancel regardless of quality of service of the connection or the quality of customer service of any company...

Not only the cancelation but the support of the end user with these issues also costs money. Running 24/7 tech support with MSN, Earthlink, AOL or any major ISP...

1800 systems don't come cheap. Money is measured in minutes.

When 50% of your calls are due to spam and pop ups... With the rest as connection issues... If somehow you can kill the reason that the end user has to call in you already saved yourself a ton of money.

Of course I've talked with people who wanted to cancel their internet because they saw a banner ad saying "You are broad casting you IP!!"

Explaining the nature of pop up ads to the user is one thing, but when they are highjacked by Xupiter, Newdotnet, or "insert your spyware of the week" it's hard to understand from their end... Not to mention those same programs will cause IE to DIE! on say Windows computer if the program itself dies. (I'd say Newdotnet is horrible for that if it eats your wsock32.dll in win98... and embedds itself all over the registry... no web pages for you...)

Heck if I know how it gets on their computers.

"Do you have Kazaa on your computer?"

Usually the answer is "yes"

Personally, I'd like to see a few ISP companies go after these Spyware companies... Sure the end user can't sue because they agreed to a EULA but it often costs their ISP large sums money in terms of support costs...

Is it just me or....

[sTavvy]

the only way i can see spammers making money is if people actually click on the ads and genuinly purchase the items they are offering, if people stopped doing this then the effort to send out 10,000 emails when only 5 people might click would seem a waste of time. and i still have no idea how they can get email accounts that have only just been created with my ISP, that have never been used before.. especially since my isp says they don't condone spamming!!! damnit. now i'm just angry.

Re:Is it just me or....

[Raven42rac]

Basically, spammers make money because some "John Doe", who does not know any better is buying their stuff. If no one clicked through and bought their stuff, it would just fizzle out. But hopefully these huge settlements will scare the "casual" ass, I mean "mass e-mail marketer" out of the "business" and the rest will be sued into oblivion. IMHO, the crux of this matter will be proving that someone either did or did not "opt-in" on some website somewhere with some "checked tiny ass checkbox" located on many websites. "I did not sign up for that", yes you did, on this date at this time. On the other hand, if you contacted them and they did not stop sending you things, then you should have a legal ground.

Moral is: do not buy their wares, and scrutinize all websites that ask for you e-mail address, read the privacy policies, and make sure you do not inadvertantly sign up for mail from "affiliates".

Re:Is it just me or....

[Spetiam]

Spammers use dictionary attacks when spamming, so that brand new email address was probably receiving spam before it existed.

Re:Is it just me or....

[AndroidCat]

Most spammers just scrape addresses from web sites (including Slashdot) or Usenet posts. The whole "opt-in" excuse usually falls under Spammer Rule #1: "Spammers always lie".

But certainly take The Boulder Pledge:

The Boulder Pledge

"Under no circumstances will I ever purchase anything offered to me as the result of an unsolicited e-mail message. Nor will I forward chain letters, petitions, mass mailings, or virus warnings to large numbers of others. This is my contribution to the survival of the online community."

IN SOVIET RUSSIA

[raduga]

linuxwrangler writes "U.S. District Judge George W. Bush Jr. awarded Earth $16 million and an injunction against John Carmack for Carmack's use of Earth to deliver "spam in a can".

Hosting my own server

[Nonillion]

This is why I host my own e-mail server. It is FAR easyer to block unwanted spam than to have no control of my ISPs based e-mail account. SPAM has to be rejected at the mail server, accepting the e-mail and then filtering it out with your e-mail client does no good at all. It will be interesting to see if any of these SPAMers ever pay up.

Maybe when hell freezes over SPAMers will finally catch a clue...nahhh, I doubt it..

Police officer?

[Trespass]

You're a loose cannon! You're off the case. I want your gun and your badge.

Avoid court fines now !

[Alain Williams]

I'm just putting the finishing touches to my sure fire way of avoiding court fines, something that I am willing to share for a mere £100. Could all slashdotters please help me in this noble enterprise by sending me the email addresses of all the spammers that they know.

Yargh!

[Anonymous Coward]

>Actually your right...

You're!

>the nazi's do serve a purpose

The Nazis!

>There purpose

Their! :-)

Re:Yargh!

[Osty]

>the nazi's do serve a purpose

The Nazis!

Bob the Angry Flower loves you!

Re: "Patriot" Legislation...

[nametaken]

Couldn't they bend 'spam' into a legally actionable offense by calling it 'terrorism'?

I know the idea of a site that sells penis enlarging devices and offers college degrees for $19.95, terrorizes me.

Re:SPAM? What's that?

[Spetiam]

It's both a matter of principle and spam does have a financial and quality of service impact on companies and consumers.

In order to dodge spam, companies/consumers have to either spend the time manually deleting spam or put out the money to buy software to filter spam. In both these cases, spam still eats bandwidth.

Companies also have to be careful (i.e., spend time/money) that software filters do not delete legitimate email, as this could potentially have a severe imapact on their business dealings, service record, etc.

Finally, the burden of spam should fall on those responsible for it, not those that are "victimized" by it. So let's still nail the spammers.

how big is the fish ?

[huistr]

I'm wondering how does he size up against the "top 180 responsible for 90% of all spam". Apparently, he is not in the ROKSO list.

Oh Goddess, please no more

[Anonymous Coward]

IN SOVIET RUSSIA, old jokes annoy you! Please, please, please, please, please, please, stop. Right now. And forevermore. Never again.

You heard me. No more.

Hey, I'm serious here.

pfft

Re:Oh Goddess, please no more

[Anonymous Coward]

All your serious are belong to us!

Re:SPAM? What's that?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're missing an important point. Even if you don't see your spam anymore, you're still paying for it. Spam is a major part of your bandwidth bill - why are you and I paying for their actions?

Re:SPAM? What's that?

[CodeBuster]

The problem with this argument is that even if we all ran Bayesian Filters and blocked 99.9% of all spam messages from hitting our inboxes there would still be billions of messages going back an forth between mail servers before they are caught by the filters. This is a major drag on Internet bandwidth even if all of us never actually saw another spam in our inboxes ever again. These people who abuse their network privileges and degrade the network for the rest of us should be caught and punished for their behavior. Another thing that would really help is for slashdot people to advocate proper mail server configuration, including disallowing open relays, and education of all of the part-time mail sysadmins out there who perpetuate the problem with their own ineptness. There are groups already trying to do these things and it is helping, but it will take much more work on the part of mail admins and users to shut the spammers down for good.

Ineffective Federal and other LEO authorities!

[mabu]

What's most interesting about this case is that it proves once again, international, federal, state and other law enforcement authorities are incompetent and ineffective. This guy broke various laws but the only way to get him was to pursue justice in civil court?

We have never needed tougher anti-spam laws... We've only needed a justice system that can get off its butt, stop chasing people in white vans, and prosecute criminals who break the law.

Remember this the next time your DA and other LEO figures come up for election. Most spammers break numerous existing laws that have nothing to do with the concept of freedom of expression which they perversely use as a smokescreen. In the case of this guy, he used stolen credit card numbers and fake identities, in addition to breaking into unauthorized computer systems.

Let that be a lesson to you spammers! If you get caught, you might have to declare bankruptcy! But you obviously don't have to worry about serving any jail time for credit card fraud or computer breakins.

What a joke. The government can spend $52 Million bucks to find out if Bill Clinton got a blowjob, but can't go after these spamming sleazebags who are polluting the Internet and breaking actual laws?

I didn't pay for noise

[mabu]

What if the ISPs sued the backbone providers? They have money. Aren't they responsible in some way? Think about it:

If you get a telephone line and when you answer the phone all you get is static, so that maybe 70% of the phone conversation can be heard, should you be paying for this extra noise that is inhibiting your ability to get appropriate utilization based on what you're paying for?

They say that 40% or more of data travelling across the Internet nowadays is rogue data, neither solicited, nor welcome. Why should ISPs and their customers pay for more bandwidth than they really need because the backbones won't get involved and stop this noise?

Most of us know, as soon as you go live on the net; as soon as you have an IP, you have unwanted traffic, port scanners, random smtp gateways hammering your system, unsecured infected Microsoft systems propagating viruses, etc. Is this what we're paying for?

If you ordered a telephone line and half the time it rang with people calling you didn't know or invite, offering you scams and offensive solicitations, the phone company would do something about it. It's not as big a deal with end users because they're not paying based on bandwidth, but certainly their ISPs who are might have a decent case to push the backbone providers to not turn the other way when they clearly know a sizeable percentage of their pipes are filled with uninvited "noise". For example, Sprint's historical policy has not been to get involved in DOS attacks unless their customer's pipe is saturated. So you can be attacked as long as there is no bandwidth left, and only then will they intervene. Imagine if this policy applied to other important utilities? You can't put your garbage out until you have a certain amount; you can't get your electricity restored until a certain percentage of your city is dark. This is BS. I say, let's start holding the backbone providers liable for hooking us up to internet pipes that are chock full of data that we didn't invite, costing everyone money and reducing everyone's security, privacy and performance.

Yes, I know this is a much more complicated issue, but you cannot deny there is a substantive conflict of interest here between the backbones, which profit off spam, and everybody else who suffers because of it.

Re:I didn't pay for noise

[Grishnakh]

If you ordered a telephone line and half the time it rang with people calling you didn't know or invite, offering you scams and offensive solicitations, the phone company would do something about it.

This is one of the big reasons I finally dumped my Qwest landline account and now only have a cellphone. Half my calls were from telemarketers or wrong numbers. Most of my calls were outbound, and long distance, so I just signed up for a cellphone, and now I don't get telemarketers at all. Plus, it's cheaper overall than a landline + long distance.

Pretty soon, residential landlines will be a thing of the past, and the telco monopolies will only have themselves to blame.

Re: "Patriot" Legislation...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, but I always wanted a PhD in Comparative Cosmology! Only $19.95! Impress your low-brow friends!

Treat Spammers like hackers!!!

[pkinetics]

1. Spam is theft of services and or equipment.
2. Spam is often misrepresented, ergo fraud.
3. Spam is often sexual harrassment.

Why not go after these people for real crimes and send them to the slammer, confiscate their equipment, and all that other stuff the FBI loves to do? Also gotta figure if these guys are making any money, their probably violating some IRS law, so send more feds after them.

Bah... until judges and politicans actually grow up around this stuff, or have to answer their own emails, they'll never pursue it.

I bet when Bill Gates kids start getting spam, we'll see some radical solutions.

Re:Treat Spammers like hackers!!!

[zarqman]

I bet when Bill Gates kids start getting spam, we'll see some radical solutions.

no need to worry about that--they can no longer log into their hotmail accounts anyway. they're getting mysterious incorrect password errors today.

Some people love spam. Really!

[blanks]

I own a company that places public internet machines around minnesota.

In one location their was this couple that would come in everyday. They would browse the web and sign up for everything and anything they could find that was free.

Finally one day I told them one day they won't recive anything that they ordered because they were all scams. Everything from cook books to free tshirts. They told me they didnt care because they just loved the idea of trying to win free stuff, or have mail sent to them to read.

Side note: I checked their email account that was disabled and it had 600megs of emails over 6 months.

Why not stick to games?

[inkswamp]

Carmack's use of Earthlink to deliver spam.

You'd think with all the great games he's made, he wouldn't have to resort to this.

Subpoena SWBell to get his address

[billstewart]

It shouldn't be too hard to get his address - doing a lawsuit in small claims is probably enough to get SWBell to cough up the address of that DSL line. And you should be able to come up with an excuse to sue him. You might be able to get the SWBell security folks after him, but more likely they'd just cancel the account and it'd be protected by their privacy policies.

Re:Subpoena SWBell to get his address

[minas-beede]

"You might be able to get the SWBell security folks after him, but more likely they'd just cancel the account and it'd be protected by their privacy policies."

SW Bell has been singularly unresponsive with respect to another relay tester - this after a SW Bell abuse person said she was determined to do something about the guy. That was months ago. The real question in my mind is whether the spammed (and otherwise abused) large ISPs this guy is targeting will wish to/be able to use the information I supply and do their own suits. The larger ISPs tend to sue for more than small claims court amounts.

He's still sending spam - he's targeted over 33000 recipients so far, in just 34 spam messages. The top one had 4269 recipients. Whew. 278 of the recipients are at swbell.net, so the spammer is fouling his own nest. Maybe that will get SW Bell to act. Plus 86 Pacbell. 1811 to mcimail - looks like phone numbers on all of them.

There's 1700 of what look like random generated addresses at msm.com (NOT msn.com). Looks like maybe he's harvested some webpoison addresses.

(Cute - the Slashdot email telling me of your reply has a rackspace ad in it.)

He really thinks he's grabbed the brass ring - found an unlisted open relay. I'm ROFL.

Re:Subpoena SWBell to get his address

[Anonymous Coward]

It would never work. SWBell would NEVER cough up that information unless you had enough evidence to prove some criminal intent. Of course you could always just send a spam complaint. What they will do is anyone's guess.

Re:Subpoena SWBell to get his address

[billstewart]

It doesn't take criminal intent - a civil lawsuit is usually good enough for that sort of thing, and unlike criminal cases, you're relatively in control of them. The real issue becomes how much of that you can do in small claims court, which in most states is cheap and minimizes paperwork compared to a regular court.

Re: "Patriot" Legislation...

[zakezuke]

Don't you want a larger penis? Sure we all do.... Here at ICS, not only do we work to give you a high school education, we also do penis enlargement, hair re-growth, hair removal, and you earn money via nigerian banking scams. I'm Sally Struthers.

Shoot me the if I ever get Sally Struthers spam.

OK, I have a friend who is a sleazebag^W spammer

[Simon Brooke]

I went round to see a friend last night. She is a mostly sensible, mostly reasonable, fairly tech literate person. Her values are on the whole mostly in the right place. She runs a small bunsiness and until recently her business has been mostly servicing a government contract. That contract ended and was not renewed. She has laid off most of her staff, but she has no income and still two employees to pay, and she's desperate to find new work.

A couple of months ago she came and talked to me about how to set up a bulk email thing and I thought I'd succeeded in persuading her that it was a seriously bad idea and she shouldn't do it. Apparently I hadn't; last night she told me she'd started sending bulk UCE.

This isn't someone whom I'd describe as sleazy, and it isn't someone who's stupid. It's someone who is desperate. I think you will find a lot of spammers are.

The problem can be tackled, it seems to me, at two levels. Yes, if there's legislation (particularly if it has real teeth) then peopel will get a good clue that this is not a good thing to do. But it also needs there to be a professional ethic among systems and network administrators that we will not allow the infrastructure we control to be used for this sort of thing, and that we will kick offenders off and cancel accounts; and that if our management say different we will refuse to work for them - a sort of hypocratic oath for geeks.

Re:SPAM? What's that?

[tijsvd]

The problem with this argument is that even if we all ran Bayesian Filters and blocked 99.9% of all spam messages from hitting our inboxes there would still be billions of messages going back an forth between mail servers before they are caught by the filters.

Of course not. If 99.9% of all spam was blocked, spamming would not be worthwhile any more. Spamming is cheap, but not that cheap (bandwidth / effort to get free bandwidth). A spammer would have to send 1000x more emails to get the same return rate. The estimated return rate on most spam is about 15 in 1 million. It would then be 15 in 1 billion.

If indeed 99.9% of spam was stopped, the whole spamming business would end and spammers would go back to whatever they were doing before.

Yes, but I still get junk like this

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello,
I represent a marketing firm that, due to overwhelming
email campaign results, have access to millions of opt-in
subscribers for online newsletters and offers.

Most Databases Contain: first,last,address,city,
state,zip,DOB,Gender,ori ginating source, IP, Time/date
stamp

If interested, please let me know what category of
interest you have, and i'll let you know what
currently available assets we have with a quote.

Thank You
Adam Weiss
Independent Rep
877-570-4483

Re:SPAM? What's that?

[AndroidCat]

(SPAM is a trademarked product of Hormel. Spam is that email stuff.)

The people who will block the 99.9% percent are not the spammer's customers. Spammer's don't mind a .005% response rate, and are the kind of people who actually buy from spammers going to adopt filtering? (We can't really force them to, can we?)

Call me!

[Anonymous Coward]

'Animats' - can you drop me an email about your spam hunt? I work for a British magazine and I'd like to do a story. It's ian.harris@futurenet.co.uk, or +44 1225 822818

Re:SPAM? What's that?

[AndroidCat]

including disallowing open relays

Open relays aren't the problem that they were a few years ago. These days, spammers mainly use open proxies these days. (Which hides the traceback past the proxy.) The high volume spammers seem to buy their proxy access, but quite a few scan for open proxies on DSL lines to do their dirty. (A number of people install something like AnalogX to allow junior to share the DSL connection, and share it with the rest of the world too.)

There's a jerk in 199.183.* space (rasserver Florida) who scans 8888, 8080, 8000, 6588, 4480, 3128, 1182, 443 and 80 every week or two. One day I'm going to leave a trap on one of those ports.

Yesterday's WSJ article

[Bob Wehadababyitsabo]

Kind of funny how this was published just yesterday...

Re:Yesterday's WSJ article

[qzulla]

THE page YOU requested IS available ONLY to SUBSCRIBERS.

Can't read it. I'm not subbed.

qz

ps it was all caps but the lameness filter bit me

Re:Yesterday's WSJ article

[Anonymous Coward]

Well - I wish I could get into "this" but I cannot from here.... what does "this" say (WSJ) - anyone care to post it?

Hey

[Anonymous Coward]

How do those spammers know I have a small penis anyways?

Re:Hey

[DickBreath]

I would be delighted to do an, um, inspection.

Re:Hey

[Crunchman]

Because they can look down your pants using your web cam - Duhhhh!

SMTP

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't those in charge, like the IETF or whomever, just frickin' rewrite the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and GET IT OVER WITH.

Re:SMTP

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out the ASRG. Anti-spam research group. They are already working on it.

Re:SPAM? What's that?

[minas-beede]

"Another thing that would really help is for slashdot people to advocate proper mail server configuration, including disallowing open relays, and education of all of the part-time mail sysadmins out there who perpetuate the problem with their own ineptness."

There's some merit in what you say - it's better to try to educate inept sysadmins than to just sit back and complain about them. But there's an entirely different path available to attack the open rely problem and that path doesn't depend on educating the inept. Instead it's educating the ept, which is about as hard.

For both open relays and open proxies the problem is that they exist AND are easily discovered. If a spammer makes a test for open relay or for open proxy the results are over 99.999% accurate. The spammer has no difficulty at all while that is true.

Salt the stock of open relays and open proxies (as determined by the types of tests the spammers now do) with fakes and the situation is very different. Then the spammer could just as easily be sending his abuse-path spam to a system controlled by someone who knows the score as he is to be sending it to a system run by a bumbling sysop (so the more bumbling management you can fake for the false abusable system the better you do.) In addition running the fake is very easy - take any standard MTA and make it accept relay email but deliver nothing and you have a trap. When you want you can force delivery of one of the test messages that comes in - then you deceive the spammer and you also know which spam is associated with that test message source (if it's fixed) and destination. Windows users can run Jackpot, which pretty well automates the whole thing: http://jackpot.uk.net. Run Jackpot in its default configuraiton a while and just trap tests. when you're ready configure it to relay and turn off relay as soon as one test message has been delivered.

The same approach works for open proxies: fake an open proxy and the spammer will try to send spam through it. with open proxies you've got a better chance that the spammer made his contact form his own IP (some spammers even test for open relay through open proxies. Some still test from their own IPs.)

When you do this you become the person in charge. The limits of what you can accomplish haven't even been established yet. Additionally, this isn't the only approach that can be taken against spammer abuse. ISPs with abused open proxies should find it very easy to trace the abuse back to the source. If the ISP would intercept proxy packets from identified spammer IPs then the spammer suddenly loses all power over all the open proxies in that ISP's entire space.

There's still more - that's enough for now.

idea for blocking spam

[Anonymous Coward]

when a mail is recieved check the mail server it comes from

if it is one of the mail exchangers for the domain of the from address allow it

if it matches a list of allowed servers for the the from address allow it

otherwise send back a message to the from address with a activation code which they can use to get that mailserver allowed to send mail from thier e-mail address

this will be a lot of work for the mailserver but cpu time is a lot cheaper than human time

the only issue here is ligitimate mailing lists i expect that there would have to be a way for users to add servers which could send to thier adress unrestricted

Re:idea for blocking spam

[DickBreath]

Great idea.

In fact, the activation code mechanism needs to be standardized. Then a bot on the sending end can recognize the activation code and automatically send a reply, thus enabling it to continue spamming you.

Re:idea for blocking spam

[Anonymous Coward]

If you placed the code inside of an image file, or as acsii images, then it would work. i don't personally know of any program that can translate colours from an image file, and tell you what they make.

How I stopped a spamming before it started

[msouth]

But it also needs there to be a professional ethic among systems and network administrators that we will not allow the infrastructure we control to be used for this sort of thing.

I had been doing the mailings for our legitimate (customers/registrants with opt-in/opt-out ability) bulk emailings, and so I was the natural go-to guy when someone fairly high up in the company was going to buy a bunch of addresses. I said something like "Isn't that against the law?". They responded that we would be using a real return address, not like the spammers, etc. "That doesn't make it any less unsolicited," I replied. That was the last that I heard about it.

Like the friend you were talking about, the company was only resorting to this out of desperation (we had our fourth round of layoffs shortly after that, and I was one of the 50% that got the axe, although I'm fairly sure it was not in retaliation). Like the "hippocratic oath" idea you were talking about, it was the moral stance of one individual that stopped it.

I have no idea if what I did would work elsewhere, but there is a very useful nugget in here if you are in the same situation--"Isn't tat illegal?" is a response that is hard to respond to. Instead of you being the bad guy for not doing what you are asked, they are the bad guy for asking you to do something illegal. Not that it is risk-free--some people would probably happily fire you. But if they fire you for not doing something illegal you have recourse for that, too, at least in some states.

Re:OK, I have a friend who is a sleazebag^W spamme

[DickBreath]

Tell her about AOL's and EarthLink's legal awards. Others suing spammers as well, including Microsoft.

Re:SPAM? What's that?

[cjjjer]

That's what I say. My main email account has never had a single piece if spam in over four years. While I do get spam on my hotmail account (and expect it) I have set the filtering to extreme and created white lists. I maintain the white lists whenever I sign up for a service that I want correspondence from. How hard is that? Spend a little time and due diligence on my part and viola! No problem.

Re:Feel the Penile Wrath

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahem. You weren't even going for FP, just the far lesser TP, and yet still...

YOU FAIL IT!

Go back to sucking cocks instead of posting 'em, tosser.

Earthlink sues spammers. I LOVE EARTHLINK!!

[rdmiller3]

I am so glad that I opted to go with an Earthlink connection (instead of TimeWarner's "RoadRunner" service).

Seeing articles about these people actively combatting the very sources of SPAM just warms my heart. Hell, I'd pay double for that kind of service.

I've been on Earthlink since sometime in August or September and have had no problems at all. (I must say that the TimeWarner installer-guy was way cool, too. He didn't much favor TimeWarner but he knew what he was doing, for sure. He had even heard of the Gateway/AOL "Touchpad" that I had worked on for Transmeta! This guy was on the ball.)

Jeez, do they have a "Donate to Earthlink" site? How 'bout a "tip my install guy" link? Hey, now that sort of thing would be sure to improve service, don't you think?

go to NANAE/NANAS if really interested

[BACbKA]

questions like this (if you really want to get help on tracing this particular guy and/or help get his account shutdown with the help of your sightings) better be taken to NANAE/NANAS newsgroups

Please read the FAQ before you post - http://www.spamfaq.net/

BTW, your sighting has been reported already, see Google groups

Re:go to NANAE/NANAS if really interested

[minas-beede]

I'm familiar with NANAE and NANAS. Thanks anyway for the tip.

I also knew, from NANAS, that the spam his been sighted - I looked for the phone number and saw a disgusting number of hits going fairly far back in time (disgusting because that means he's gotten away with it for so long.)

Looking in ROKSO I see a Howard Minsky has sometimes claimed a Tulsa location - maybe it's him. I figure that it's more important to someone who does some form of enforcement to know the name - I can just know him by his relay test profile (where the tests originate, where they go) and be satisied. It is, of course, nice to have a name to attach to the spammer.

And yet, boo-freakin'-hoo

[GMFTatsujin]

So she turned to a life of crime and sleazery after losing a juicy gubbment contract? Wah. She sounds like a one-shot Batman villian -- a couple of bad days and suddenly she's a masked vigilante.

I've been on the skids too. Putting that kind of time and effort into FINDING A JOB was much more satisfying than hitting up my tech-buds as accomplices to degrading the Internet yet another notch. Well done, Obi-Wan, your failed teachings have brought another soul to the Dark Side.

Thanks for putting a human face on the issue and all, but really.
GMFTatsujin

Re:SPAM? What's that?

[Kombat]

Spam is a major part of your bandwidth bill

I call bullshit. I would venture that the bandwidth used by downloading movies and music (oops, sorry, I meant "previewing"), combined with surfing and gaming bandwith FAR, FAR outweighs a few hundred kilobytes of unwanted spam.

Spam sucks, but let's not make things up here, guys. Keep things in perspective. No need to lie.

Yahoo! ... But What Can We Do?

[webzombie]

I recently started receiving a much larger volume of spam then usual from Yahoo! so I fired off another email to abuse@yahoo.com with the appropriate information or so I thought.

Yahoo! promptly replied to me inquiry and said that they had reviewed the email in question and that someone had forged the email header so it looked like it came from Yahoo! and there was nothing they could do... but then later on in the same email Yahoo! that stated they track down people who abuse Yahoo! email including forgeries... so why not this one...

So what is a poor spam wallowing fool to do!

I think eliminating FREE email could go along way in curbing this problem. IMHO

the solution

[Anonymous Coward]

the solution of cours is that you invade the axis of evil sheltering spammers and other terrorists and bring the US law to hurt them.

Yesterday Afghanistan, today Iraq, tomorrow the world.

Re:the solution

[the_ghost226]

And after that America's living rooms! Oh, wait. They've done that already. never mind

Forget the spammer..hit the company that pay them

[elpapacito]

As long as spammers are paid, they'll find new
tricks, much like pushers do with addicted people. Hit the company paying them, make a list of companies using spam as advertising method, destroy their "public image" by pointing out the truth, they're filling you email inbox with tons of useless message you'll never read anyway and wasting precious internet resources that may lead to an increase of ISP subscription costs.

Terms: Porno vs Porn

[KlomDark]

Doesn't it bring to mind the image of a fat teenaged jackoff when you hear people call it "porno" instead of porn?

Porn is such a more elegant word, you can kind of get a manly growl saying it "pooorrrrrn". But the word "porno" reduces you to a high-pitched, whiny, barely pubescent sound.

Real men look at porn.

Dorky boys say "Hey guys, look, I've got some porno and a new D&D video game." If you're going to beat off several times a day, at least change the sheets once a week. Otherwise you end up with a smell in your room that you don't notice, but everybody else does. Especially your mother. It's really disgusting.

giantweb and giantdsl

[Anonymous Coward]

someone in FLA please hurt them really bad. thanks.

Earthlink spams it own customers

[lee1]

When I used dialup and had an Earthlink email address, I regularly received spam from Earthlink advertising great deals on printers and other stuff I didn't want. The usenet groups dealing with Earthlink were full of complaints about this spam, but they never responded. So what do you do when your own ISP insists on spamming you?

Re:Earthlink spams it own customers

[Anonymous Coward]

So what do you do when your own ISP insists on spamming you?

You switch ISP, like I did (I used to be on Earthlink too, had opted out of their spam, didn't buy anything, but they kept sending HTML spams). My current provider hasn't spammed me once (yet; fingers crossed :&)

If you run into that problem again, this site lets you compare among thousands.

Re:SPAM? What's that?

[Crunchman]

Ok, here's a neat project for the self proclaimed spam hater - and I know that at least 80% of ./ people are capable of doing this... Develop a Honeypot mail gateway program desiged to suck in a spammer into using it. Then, gather all kinds of goodies on the spammer. And obviously don't pass the mail. Make it easy to use and install on Linux, WinBlows, BSD. Make these proxies smart enough to be "fingerprinted" as a "good score" for spammers. I know a number of people doing this already, but I'm talking about putthing this out on a massive scale. Unfortunately, that won't help the bandwidth problem, but it WOULD somewhat dilute the spammer's proxy resource, plus these fake proxies can also have some good tracing features.

Money money money

[t0ny]

Hey, suing Spammers seems to be pretty profitable for ELNK.

Maybe Sun should switch to going after spammers, because suing MS doesnt seem to be going so well for them.

Re:OK, I have a friend who is a sleazebag^W spamme

[GigsVT]

I have a friend who was doing freelance web development, he was hired by someone sleezy a while back, eventually it came out it involved spam. I gave him shit about working for a spammer, but above that, what are we supposed to do?

The IT community in general isn't an elite social club, that's what made us unique and powerful in the first place, we are a loose collabration of people with common interest. We disdain elitist clubs and the accompanying politics on the whole. We respect knowledge and skill, not political gyrations to sleeze your way into the "in" crowd.

So, with such an amphorus social structure, how would such an ethical structure be imposed?

Re:First PSOT

[Anonymous Coward]

WOULD YOU FAFFGOTS STOP IMNING ME!?!!!

god dman dont you loosers have anything better to do

Vigilante Squads

[Electric Eye]

Sure. I know murder is illegal. But, it seems to work in many spots throughout the world. In fact, if anyone read the WSJ yesterday, vigilante squads in a poor Rio neighborhood has eliminated crime, as compared to slums surrounding it. And the people love it and accept it. I say we do the same with spammers. Find them. Make them disappear w/o a trace. Buh bye, now!

Re:OK, I have a friend who is a sleazebag^W spamme

[TekPolitik]

It's someone who is desperate.

Much - if not most - property crime is committed by people who are desperate. That doesn't make it right. In a first world country there is always another choice - even if it's getting a job packing groceries, waiting tables or flipping burgers, or evIt's someone who is desperate.en collecting unemployment benefits.

To put it another way, it's easy to be honest when you're doing well while being honest. It's the choices you make when things get tough or there is an opportunity to do better by being dishonest that make the difference between who is sleazy/amoral/unreasonable and somebody who is honest/moral/reasonable.

Your "friend" merely had no prior reason to demonstrate that she was sleazy, amoral and unreasonable.

Re: "Patriot" Legislation...

[chloroquine]

Sometimes I think my undergraduate degree is worth about $19.95. This is why I'm getting another worthless degree now. But at least this time they pay me to go to school.

Re:SPAM? What's that?

[minas-beede]

Well for WinBlows there's already Jackpot: http://jackpot.uk.net. It works pretty well.

For Linux, sendmail can be used as a honeypot, if the Linux system isn't already running sendmail (I think the best honeypots are systems with no real email function, where that means email using incoming port 25).

What you propose would be a great beginning project for a programming class that's up to the point of doing network programming. Give them the SMTP spec and tell them to create something that looks like an MTA but isn't.

There's also been a Perl version of a honeypot posted to NANAE maybe over a year ago. the author saids there was a second, better version but I don't know anything after that. Really it isn't that hard, particularly if you just create an abuse email grabber. The author of Jackpot added in code to deliver detected spammer test messages and when the author did that he simply incorporated another person's MX lookup - he didn't try to reinvent that.

There are 43145 recipients so far for the current spam run. The only network traffic is the spam coming in - there's a total of just 70 messages for all this spam. If the messages went out there'd be a whale of a lot more network traffic - the spam would go to quite a few different ISPs. So I burn some incoming network bandwidth in order to cause the spammer difficulty.

Another good project would be open proxy honeypots. One important thing about those is that if a spammer is hiding his own IP by going through a chain of open proxies then some open proxy is first in that chain. If that's a honeypot the spammer has given himself away to that honeypot. It should be obvious, too, that more effort in seeking out proxy logs would also give ammunition against the spammers.

My honeypot (the one that so far has 43,145 recipients) is a standard (but old and obsolete) MTA with the output mail queue stopped (it's a VMS system.) I manually forced delivery of a relay test yesterday - that's why the spam started. Almost anyone with a good working knowledge of some MTA can do something similar.

(How "old and obsolete"? It doesn't know EHLO.)

I read it in the dead tree version

[bluGill]

Yesterday's (5/7/2003) eddition, front page. Any reasonably equiped library should have it. I don't read their online version so I don't have a URL.

Collecting a judgement is not the only way to win

[Anonymous Coward]

If they get more money back than was spent on the process, I will be surprised.

If they don't, then they shouldn't have sued in the first place.

Earthlink was spending money on bandwidth from when the spammer first started, so they may get a net win even without collecting.

There should also be some deterrent effect on other spammers.

We know what he charged in one case

[Anonymous Coward]

Without knowing what he charged his customers, his fine doesn't seem all that large.

One of his clients stated that on a supposed run of millions of pieces of spam there were 36 orders returned. At 10 dollars each, the spammer got $360 from the client selling HGH.

Doesn't ANYONE Use Earthlink here?

[Anonymous Coward]

Geez, people ...

I DROPPED Earthlink like a hot turd precisely because THEY WERE SPAMMING ME and wouldn't stop. They don't call it "spam" (of course). They call it a "special offer" (or some such nonsense). Point of fact -- They can e-mail me my bill and any announcement directly impacting my account. ANYTHING ELSE IS SPAM.

It kills me that these bastards are claiming to be SPAM BUSTERS and getting away with it. Check ANY UseNet spam-busting group to get the straight dope on Earthlink.

Re:OK, I have a friend who is a sleazebag^W spamme

[Anonymous Coward]

Scare her away.

Call her from a public phone.
Mask your voice.
Tell her that you got a UCE from her.
Tell her that you tracked her down.
Tell her that you know where she lives.
Give her a detail or two so she'll believe this is serious.
Tell her that if you get another UCE from her, you'll come to her place and her.
And her parents.
And her cat too.
Hang up.

In the end, you'll be doing her a favor.

It's a Shame!

[Anonymous Coward]

I owe my enormous penis, large breasts, million dollar bank account, eternal youth, repaired credit, unbeatable mortgage rates, escapades with horny house wives and increased sex drive to these guys. I really hate to see them lose in court.

Re:SPAM? What's that?

[CodeBuster]

I apologize for not responding to all of the excellent responses in a more timely fashion, but I am currently switching companies and moving my residence so I have been somewhat distracted. I was pleased with some of the suggestions of the responders and intrigued by some of the solutions that have been cobbled together by able administrators using existing tools. The question I would like to propose to the honeypot and the jackpot users is this:

What do you plan to do with the e-mails or IP addresses that you log in your trap?

The spammers probably do not care if you catch them red-handed if there is no threat of serious punishment (fine or imprisonment); they will simply switch ISPs and resume their spamming activities. Let me be clear, I believe that honey pots are valuable for understanding the tactics used by spammers and for raising the barrier of entry (limiting the number of small time operators).

In response to the post concerning filtering effectiveness and spam deterrence:

I question the notion that spammers would be stopped simply by extremely low return rates. In fact, I have heard that a response rate of approximately 1/10 of 1% is considered a resounding success by these spammers. It is also widely known that large volume spammers employ software tools written by secretive foreign companies that only accept payment in bank wire transfers (BTW: any software developer that would work for these companies really has joined the dark side). Thus, it is difficult for me to see why a low success and response rate per message would be a deterrent. The spammers will simply up the number of messages to compensate for the lower response rates and thus aggravate the aforementioned bandwidth problem.

Thank you all for taking the time to respond.

Re:OK, I have a friend who is a sleazebag^W spamme

[theLOUDroom]

What's her email address, name and street address?