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

spammers?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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

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.

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: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: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

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: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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.