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Disgruntled Fan Arrested, Indicted For Spam Attacks
An anonymous reader submits: "A *very* interesting precedent here might get set here. A California man has been arrested by the FBI for sending spam spoofing the From: email address of several Philadelphia-area newspaper editors and writers. The charges relate to the damage caused by having the bounces sent back to the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, with a total of more than 160,000 bounced emails. Maximum penalties: 471 years in federal prison, $117 million in fines." And not just arrested, either -- Reader red_dragon points to the indictment (PDF linked from this U.S. Attorney's Office release).
Sending spam is bad.
That being said, does it seem a little unfair that the indictment charges him with "hacking", when in fact he just spoofed his email address?
"Oh, beautiful for spacious skies...."
gah.
have you been seen on slash?
471 years in prison for spamming? 100s of millions in fines?
I dont care how much you nerds hate spam. Prison is for people dangerous to society. Murderers, rapists, other assorted thugs. Society isn't helped because a spammer is in jail.
Why this the first case they pick up on, because this guy dared to screw with the media? (Think Lamo and the NYT thing). Government/media go hand in hand these days.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
If I were king of the universe, rather, WHEN I am king of the universe, spammers will get the death penalty.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
471 years in jail, eh? What's so wrong with lifetime?
And isn't prison about rehabilitation? Will this guy rehabilitate by never in his life having a chance of getting out.
Or is prison just about hot male on male action nowadays? I'd say so...
I hope Arnold will create some kind of prison reform.
Oh, and there's a word I didn't know in the article(and I won't even bother checking some book). What does 'scatological' mean?
$117mil/160k mails = $731.25 per email.
Now, I've had spammers use my address as a from: address a couple of times, resulting in a couple of thousand bounces in my inbox.
When should I expect my check for $1,462,500 to arrive?
When people like Steve Hardigree have done orders of magnitude more damage, are just as easy to find, and have all the evidence ever needed for such an indictment stored at spamhaus.org? It doesn't make sense. Even if you can't get a conviction, which seems unlikely, wouldn't it put a serious dent in the spam problem if some of these worthless spammers were handed an indictment of this size?
Do you have ESP?
If that, in and of itself, can constitute a crime then pretty much every spammer ever is guilty of the same thing -- just spread about amongst different people. Instead of one company incuring all the "financial damage" of bounced emails, it's many thousands with the "damage" spread around.
Still . . . I have to believe that there is something more to this story than is posted here. If the hacking charge truly comes from simply lying in the "From:" portion of an email, then I will have lost all faith in humanity.
And of couse, the punishment is obviously completely absurd. I'm torn about what to do with this guy myself. Clearly what he did constitutes a DOS attack of sorts, and yet what he did is essentially no different than what every spammer does everyday. IANAL, but if this case is sucessfully prosucuted, wouldn't that give precedent for prosecuting every spammer out there?
Let's look at California penal code.
How about throwing acid in someone's face?
OK, let's see, what if I attack someone with a knife?
Hell, given that Arnie is now governator of California what happens if I start spraying machinegun fire around?
So, four years in jail for permanently disfiguring someone, four years for cutting somebody up with a knife, twelve for machinegunning people and... 471 years for spoofing a From: email header.
Ah, yes, justice...
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
The part about hacking into people's computers should arguably be a prosecutable offense. But "spoofing" the from address should not be: the "From:" line is currently pretty much only advisory and will remain so until there are significant technical changes to the email infrastructure.
And it's too easy to put in the wrong "From:" line accidentally when configuring mail systems. For example, I was using the right account name with the wrong domain name for a week once in my From: line (I thought my mail was broken). Someone else actually got some of the responses intended for me.
How nice of the US Attorney's Office to publish the defendant's FULL NAME, CURRENT ADDRESS and DATE OF BIRTH prominently on the web, for all to see.(See linked PDF in topic) Even better, this guy is going to be out of the house for a while, so it should be no problem to pick up his mail.
I swear, the only thing protecting this guy's ID now is his new-found criminal record.
While I obviously agree with the notion of the punishment fitting the crime, I also think a message needs to be sent to the dorks that take part in this sort of anti-social behavior.
Not to be melodramatic or anything, but if you ask me, clowns like this contribute more to the "downfall of society" than the murderers, rapists, etc. In life, I'm not worried about being murdered or raped precisely because, for the most part, the murderers and rapists are in prison. On the other hand, I am worried (and highly annoyed) by the spammers, h4x0rz, script kiddies, etc., that pull this kind of crap because they think it's funny and because THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH IT. Ultimately, my quality of life is impacted (in terms of lost time, money, etc.) more by these computer dipshits who get their giggles by doing this stuff, and DOS attacks, and letting loose blaster worms, and stealing important source code, and all this computer nonsense.
Yes, some of these things are more terrible than others. But frankly, they're all born from the same mind. The same punk kid who pulls this spamming crap probably runs with the crowd of dorks that take part in more nefarious computer acts. So send a message! I can live without fear of being murdered or raped, yet I have to put up with this? THAT's annoying.
Society IS helped by getting rid of these jerks.
Consider the 100,000 recipients that were also victimized. $1,170 per victim does not seem outrageous to me.
Spam penalties should be proportionate to the number of people affected by the act. If you send a million emails, you should do at the very least a year in jail in my opinion.
Don't forget that's the MAXIMUM penalty. For every bounced e-mail there is a certain penalty, they add up and form a maximum penalty. A judge will set a MUCH MUCH lower penalty based on the crime and the damage done. The only reason the penalty was so high is because everything is automated, it's a lot easier for a computer to commit a crime 160,000 times.
If you made a script that raped or murdered 160,000 people your maximum penalty would be quite high too. I think it's about 4 million years in prison for 160,000 second degree murder charges. And I think the minimum sentence for 160,000 rape charges would be a bit under 3 million years. It wasn't that the penalty for this persons crimes should be over 400 years in prison, it's just that the maximum penalties add up to that and the fines also just happen to add up to over 100 million.
Already been tried. On atheists.
As a victim of this guy's antics, I say it's about time this guy is put behind bars. My dad, who runs the software business for which I handle IT, was impersonated by this guy after proving the guy wrong on a couple of points on the old forum on the Phillies' homepage. Apparently this ticked the guy off, and he went on a forged usenet post rampage, posting spam messages appearing to come from our company, as well as trying to portray my dad as a child pornographer. It was all we could do to stop the flood of bad PR coming our way. After the guy started impersonating reporters and Phillies officials, the FBI got involved, and my dad was able to give them information about what IP address he was posting from, what ISP he used, etc.
Click here for a thread on a forum that I run that has more details on some of this guy's antics.