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In Pursuit Of A Spammer
Kyle writes "Over at DSL Reports, We are currently pursuing a spammer from the West Palm Beach, Florida area. This wouldn't normally be news, but we think Slashdot readers may be interested in just how successful we have been. What's more interesting is that the spammer appears to be posting in the thread."
If I bring you back his ears?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
It turns out, after I caught a spammer, I wasn't allowed to kill him. Apparently, that's not classified as justifiable homicide. You know how silly I feel now?
"We are currently pursuing a spammer from the West Palm Beach, Florida area."
Will be see this on Fox?
Pursuit of fleeing vehicles is much more common in LA, but the West Palm Beach folks are very fond of pursuing rental trucks full of votes to be recounted. So now they are just chasing a truck load of canned pork, doesn't really surprise me much.
We've found a spammer, may we burn him?
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
he has an email newsletter. Let's all sign up!
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
Yes, sadly every time I go online it costs me money. Telecom NZ sells its badwidth dearly - 20 cents/MB when I exceed my limit (each month I get a whopping 1000MB to play with to my heart's content. Weehee!). It's not much but as the number of spam I get increases so do my costs. Directly. I'm not billing for my time to open them all, my electricity to power the PC or any other stuff.
It's not just spam, it's any unsolicited use of my bandwidth - and yes, viruses should be included too.
I am a leaf on the wind
I live in West Palm Beach! I might try bribing his garbage man to dump a truckload of junk in his yard.
Common sense is not so common.
All they have done so far is make a lot of links from one site/organization to another. There has been no action against the spammer. They are not certain of his real name nor his address. I think its great that they're tracking him down, but I would not go so far as to say they have been successful.
Notably, the most fervent researcher on the forum (Ameritec Tech) has discovered that the spammer was violating several people's copyrights. One of those people has replied and stated they are taking legal action against the spammer immediately for the violation.
For to end yet again.
The First Amendment has been interpreted by the US courts to me the protection of personal expression. .. E-mail could be considered to be therefore protected.
While the text of an email can be considered "speech", it's irrelevant - it can still (and should) be regulated, as the first amendment only guarantees that you have the right to speech, it doesn't guarantee that you have the right to any and every method of expressing that speech - especially when it's the receiver, or some other third party, which is paying for it.
Think about it - should you be able to walk into a TV station and demand to be given airtime to talk about your "100% natural penis enhancment" product? Of course not! Why should email be any different?
The first amendment gives you the right to say what you want. It does NOT guarantee you the right to force people to listen, nor the right to force someone else to pay for your speech.
It's unfortunate that your comments were modded down to -1. Given the opportunity, I would have modded your statements Interesting even though I disagree with you.
This really drills down to the core issue of spam: money. Based upon what I've read on the subject, I (via my subscription fee) am subsidizing the cost of a spammer's business. I welcome any evidence that contradicts this, but until that time I would analogize your statement as follows: "It is their right to barge into your home and shove an ad in your face and it's your right to stop them....and by the way, this process will cost you $$."
That kind of thinking doesn't work because I can't legally put a bullet into a spammer's head. One's right to free speech ends at my doorstep. Any alternative interpretation of the First Amendment opens up a number of conflicts with the Fourth Amendment.
--K.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.
So if the spammer weighs as much as a duck....
then he's made of wood?
and therefore?
A WITCH!
BURN HIM! BURN HIM!
Someone sent a couple of spam messages to a forum. Apparently they picked the wrong forum because now the whole rat-pack is trying to track down the sender.
Using google, who-is databases, other directories, some luck and some pluck they have unearthed all details of that guy (Name, address, phone number, company he works for, color of his underwear and so on).
Being a rather slow day on Slashdot, it makes it as one of the stories of the day.
2: It's an unrepentant spammer. That is grounds for permanent disconnection. Find out as much as possible about them and do what is necessary to insure that they are never able to connect to any ISP ever again. Unrepentant repeat criminals are removed from society, and unrepentant repeat spammers should be removed from the Internet.
3: It's an unrepentant spammer sending spam about some kind of service to fight spam... I don't even know where to begin on that one.
4: It's a story about how a slimeball spammer is being tracked down and is obviously nervous about it. It's a how-to. It's a recipe. It's inspirational. It is very much Stuff That Matters.
On behalf of my good friend Kaj Faiojiu, webmaster of iouem.com, I'd like to ask you not to post his email address in public.
Thanks.
Summary:
/.'ed), I think.
Dslreports maintains an anti-spam forum, which discusses spam-fighting techniques. A recently registered user, AntiSpamCard, posts to the forum advertising its spam-fighting product, AntiSpamCard. This violates the rules of the forum, so another user, AmeritechTech, looks up the domain registration information (registration service: RegistryFly.com). It is full of false information (mostly na, na, na filled in everywhere). AntiSpamCard claims that false info is RegistryFly's fault. Further investigation leads AmeritechTech to believe AntiSpamCard are, in fact, spammers. The evidence:
- Privacy statement on antispamcard.com states that they have an opt-out policy on receiving info
- Domain listed as unwelcome here and here
From these sites, AmeritechTech discovers that antispamcard.com and putamericatowork.com are both owned by Brad Heckman in Palm Beach, FL. IP address for antispamcard.com seems to be within a block assigned to Crescive, Inc. (not to be confused with some car company), which is also mentioned on antispamcard.com. The host for this block of IPs is traci.net. Traci.net has a strict anti-spam policy. Name servers also appear to be owned by Brad, and hosted by traci.net. Registration of the domain names of the name servers also has na, na, na filled into most fields. Putamericatowork.com turns out to be hosted by aitcom.net, which has a very strict anti-spam policy. AmeritechTech also claims Brad owns spaminsurance.com, but I'm not sure why. IP in the same block (which it is) and identical layouts (can't check, antispamcard.com
After various emails to the various hosting companies, antispamcard.com and spaminsurance.com magically have valid registration information. AmeritechTech also gets an email from Brad from igpbrad@hotmail.com (remember that email) saying the registration info is updated. Antispamcard.com registered to Brad, spaminsurance.com registered to Chad Deckard. Same guy? Associates? Who knows, but there seems to be a link (in later posts, this is contested by "mystery poster" Ry2k, but the link seems pretty strong). Hunting around for Chad Deckard stuff turns up claims on this board that he's associated with a scam to sell Kazaa "Gold", which is really just Kazaa Lite, but with a 9.95 price tag, plus it harvests your email. The site's still up, but I couldn't repeat the behaviour claimed by the message poster (posted back on Sept. 11, 2002) that takes you to infogeneratorpro.com, which seems to be the site registered to Chad. Also conspicuous is that Chad's name shows up on putamericatowork.com, a site owned by Brad (link). Also VERY conspicuous is that Brad emailed from igpbrad@hotmail.com, i.e. InfoGeneratorPro? Maybe a coincidence...
Some more looking uncovers other domains in Chad's name: infogenerator.com, usub.net, and finder-network.com. This is along with spaminsurance.com and infogeneratorpro.com. About this time Ry2k shows up to claim that Kazaa Gold was just a client of Chad's, and when Chad found out what they were doing, the account was eliminated. Ry2k claims to be a former employee of Chad's, and warns the forum of tarnishing the good name of legitimate businesses in their persuit of spammers. I go to bullet mode, as it's getting late, and I'm tired:
- Reverse look-ups on contact info for antispamcard.com produce a fax number registered to infogenerator.com.
- Domain name servers (safeidentity.net) for antispamcard.com has contact info updated to Crescive, Inc.
- Someone points out that RegisarFly.com may be shady, something about "using CNAME for their MX records". Maybe someone can fill me in...
- google groups turns up complaints about spam from
"Now gluttony and exploitation serves eight!" - TV's Frank