Slashdot Mirror
Spammer Profile: Scott Richter
prostoalex writes "Westword.com published an article on Scott Richter, the owner of what is supposedly the nation's fastest-growing online marketing company, which mostly specialized in sending out those unsolicited electronic mail messages. Richter is the guy currently being sued by New York Attorney General and Microsoft Corporation for sending out nearly 9000 e-mails only to Hotmail accounts."
You see this in business news all the time. Brand X is the fastest growing company blah blah. Well, yeah. It's easy to see big growth numbers when you have three employees.
--- Ban humanity.
Rule #1: Spammers lie.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
"OptInRealBig sends out between 50 million and 250 million e-mails a day, generating close to $2 million a month in revenues."
And people wonder why spammers do what they do. There are $2m worth of idiots connected to the internet.
But according to him he's raking in the big bucks! He used to be fat, but now he's 240lbs! Hey, I wonder if he has a large penis now as well?
Point is, the article failed to mention the fact that he is still stealing resources from other ISP machines. While he claims that the Internet isn't free, and he's one of those good "internet marketer bulk emailers" and that all 40 million email addresses were opt-in, and that he's not one of those scummy "hard core spammers" and he honors all remove requests...
Spammers ALWAYS LIE!
He and Darl should get together sometime...
----
I know, this is probably redundant and has probably already been said... but I do hate when thieveses like this joker just keep getting away with spamming.... so the question is asked. Who is giving him the money to continue his "business" and how can we (or anyone) stop it?
How the hell can you call spamming "online marketing". Although I'm, a techie, I have respect for skilled marketeers, analyzing markets and fitting producsts to customers.. Spammers just dump their shit indiscriminately. It's like calling the burger flipper at McDonalds a chef!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Is it possible to "SPAM back" someone by the means of /. effect?
I suppose you'd also favor chopping off someone's hand when they steal something?
An eye for an eye is not sound policy. We've got various laws against using your computer to create a nuisance for others, and they apply to us all, not just to spammers. I don't think I'd cry if any or all of the top ten spammers happened to be hit by a truck, but that doesn't mean I condone intentionally running them down.
This guy is finally getting at least some of what he deserves, which is a trial potentially followed by punishment under the law. If you can contribute evidence to support the charges against him, or bring new charges, then go for it. Otherwise, leave it be.
... sending out emails that no one reads.
Obviously false. That's the carrot at the end of the stick.
<grrr>
Since if one idiot in 100,000 clicks on it he makes money.....
Well, think about it for a moment. If you even have a real product, and that product costs, oh say around $25, what happens if you mass email 10 million people, and .005 % of them respond and buy? Congratulations - you just made $1,250,000.
But this is slashdot. A slashdoter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber!
My favorite quote from the article:
"We made nothing," Richter recalls. "I thought all you had to do was put up a Web site and you'd be a millionaire. I didn't understand the Internet."
Richter, on his first attempt at online marketing.
He just summed up the entire tech bubble.
the problem is that there's people out there who buy this stuff.. just read the bit about the iraq playing cards.
his a classic example of an oppurtunist that just doesn't care, just as long as he makes money. had he been from a different neighbourhood he would be pimpin or selling crack. " At 32, Richter's already spent nearly two decades chasing the Next Big Thing -- and finding it, the past few years, in cyberspace."
"The Pentagon had developed the cards as an intelligence tool, to be distributed to the troops. Richter saw them as the war souvenir the public had been waiting for. Within hours, his company was shooting out e-mails advertising the cards for sale -- more than 15 million e-mails, in fact. Richter moved 40,000 decks of the cards in a week, buying them for 89 cents each and selling them for $5.95. Yet at the time he started the blitz, he didn't have a single deck in stock. Nobody did.". find a product that's cool for stupid people and sell it through a medium that reaches the stupid people - kaching!
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I quite agree. When I hear this type of confused smokescreen argument I think of everyone's favorite litigious bastards, the SCO Group. No such thing as a free lunch, so pay me right now.
The argument is weak, and not very well thought out. The assertion he's making is that my e-mail can't be free because there's no such thing as a free lunch. But my e-mail is already non-free. I see ads when I check it. I pay something like $17 a year for POP3 access. In short, his crap e-mail doesn't justify my mailbox's existence. There is already an economic model behind it before a single spam lands in it.
There is a special place in hell for people like Scott Richter, and we owe a lot of thanks to to the folks from Redmond and New York who are helping to escort him there.
Can someone please verify this?
For all I know Mr. AC could have posted his 'friends' phone number, got modded up as informative, and exploited the slashdot crowd to arrange a personal vendetta against some random bloke.
in my Mecury Mail rule file.
That doesn't block the senders e-mail address but rather the links that spammers use. Spammers use countless IPs and countless forged e-mail addresses to send spams that all point to the same domain so it's a highly effective means to block large amounts of spam. You also can't obfuscate a link thanks to HTML standards. And since only spammers use those domains there's 0% collateral damage. Unless someone is foolish enough to buy one of the blocked domains that doesn't intend to use it for spam.
The other benefit is that a new IP is free from the ISP or from that open proxy. Domains cost money. By filtering out those domains I've basically cost spammers a thousand bucks or so because all those domains are now useless to advertise to my e-mail accounts. The more domains they buy to try to spam me with the more money they waste.
I also have a simple catch-all written in VB to bait spam with on my home connection which saves me money on bandwidth since I can preemptively filter domains on my real server.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Since when does 'a lot' have to mean 'the majority'?
When it's implied that the two are the same. Try reading the thread in context.
What the original poster said is true, a lot of spammers are based overseas.
First of all, no - there are only a few spammers (IMHO) that are based overseas.
And second, nitpicking doesn't change that he meant (based on context) that most spammers are based overseas.
I don't know about the overhead, but I'm sure it's bigger than zero. Fifteen million emails at (say) 1K apiece (probably an overestimate, but it's a rough order of magnitude) is fifteen gigabytes.
If you want to get that out in any sort of reasonable order, you're going to require a T1, at $1K per month. It's probably more than that; he probably requires a T3, for more money. Plus a bunch of servers and a small team of MSCEs to maintain them.
Plus his own marketing department to find people willing to hire him to spam, and a sales department to actually fulfill all of those 40,000 transactions. And an office to put them in, and so on.
Rough guess, it takes him $10K per month to stay in business. Now, that's still trivial compared to a $200K profit, but it's not "virtually nil". And I'd bet I'm low by as much as an order of magnitude; businesses have a way of being more expensive than you expect.
The next trick is to raise his rents, as it were. Hit him with a fine when he sends illegal spam (as opposed to the legal stuff under the MAY SPAM law). Make service providers drop him for fear of being sued. And if he steps a toe out of line (like being behind MyDoom), send him to jail for a trillion years.
Spammers have a different mindset from normal people.
They are trying to sell a product, but they usually tell lies in the subject field and/or the From line. Most of us wouldn't think "Hey, I want to sell to people, so I'll start out by making it clear that I'm lying to them and can't be trusted." But spammers think that way. And some people are apparently dumb enough to buy from them.
Nah, we'd rather see castration/sterilization used.
Mind you, I'm not talking about "chemical" castration, either...
It's only fair--a penis as large as the ones they must have would constitute a medical problem, I should think. That is to say nothing of the female spammers who might've tested those pills by mistake...
In any event, to counter the notion that it is "cruel and unusual punishment" I would submit that we already have similar punishment for some sex offenders, and that spammers who send sexual advertisements most certainly target children, and thus, spammers may be considered sex offenders, so...
I am now getting somewhere in the area of 40,000 spams a day to one of my servers. This system handles e-commerce for a number of small and medium-sized companies. The volume of junk e-mail has gotten so out of hand that it's bogging down my mail processes sending/receiving clients order acknowledgements and critical communication.
More than 80% of the mail my system handles is totally unsolicited. In fact, a substantive portion of it is random names @ random domains - there's no way it was ever solicited or welcome!
Now I have to build an entirely new server because F'ing assholes like this guy waste my resources and I have to handle his shit or else I'll lose my legitimate business. To say I'm furious is an understatement to the Nth degree. Any money this asshole makes is at the expense of thousands of ISPs who have to spend money and time on bandwidth and system resources. THIS GUY NEEDS TO BE IN JAIL!!!
In fact, the death penalty should be modified for spammers to make sure it's slow and painful. A literal death by a thousand needle pricks might be very appropriate to the crime. Just pinch them once for every spam they sent.
...and I'm also sure that's why you're at +5, I'd like to hear your opinion on how someone raping, torturing and finally killing a child should be punished. Or Osama Bin Laden for that matter. Because then you either have some really morbid ideas, or you believe that sending a bunch of 0s and 1s over an Internet connection is the worst crime a human can commit.
A single spammer would be a slight annoyance. A million spammers is a disaster. But let's take another of Slashdot's favorite subjects, mp3 trading. A single mp3 pirate would be a slight annoyance. A million pirates is a disaster. By the same logic that lets you judge spammers by the total damage caused by spam, the RIAA should also be allowed to judge pirates by the total damage caused by piracy. Wouldn't surprise me if they went for the death penalty too.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
No, because as has been documented (including this FA) only a small number of Americans are responsible for most of the spam. With file trading, there are millions of us^H^H them, so dividing the damage by the number of perps does not lead to death penalties in this case.
It's about the mass effect. These guys don't just torture one person. They torture (yes, spam is torture) millions of users every day. Add up the time wasted on spam (someone on /. did) and you end up with staggering amounts of time, equalling several human lifetimes. Killing one child is bad, but in effect, spam kills dozens every year.
Anyway, you shouldn't drag down spam discussion to child rapists. You can't compare the two at all, and punishment should be decided in each case seperately. As for Osama, I'm not going there, but Osama has killed less people that George Bush Junior has. Mind you, the Iraq war was just as illegal as blowing up the WTC (and one could argue that the US Gov't is guilty of gross neglience in that case anyway).
As for the RIAA, the damage done by file sharing is at best open to discussion; either way we do live in a democracy. If 70% of people think filesharing is okay, then it ought to be legalized, no matter what a small minority of lobbyists try to shove down your throat.
Kjella, those 1's and 0's are only as good or bad as they're used for. E.g., posting pics of child rape is also just 1's and 0's, but somehow that doesn't make it as harmless as hosting a human rights site.
;)
E.g., if you're into splitting things into bits and then debating those bits, a landmine is just nitrogen, oxygen, iron, carbon, and some other equally harmless elements. Nothing you wouldn't find in soil naturally, you know. So, by that kind of warped logic, surely noone should be punished for placing a few of them on a playground. Right?
E.g., a bullet is only lead and a copper jacket. You probably get the analogy with "it's only 1's and 0's" by now.
Basically what I'm saying is: it's safe to get off that high horse now
It's not the 1's and 0's we're debating, it's the way they're used.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Sadly, they're just doing what everyone else in the computer industry is doing. It's become not only acceptable, but _expected_ to lie your ass off.
"Normal" people also wouldn't, for example, think "hey, I'm trying to sell stuff to these people, so let's first make sure I've annoyed the living crap out of them. Surely they'll express their hatred by buying lots of stuff."
Yet all the pop-up and pop-under ad retards do just that. Not only that, but now they want to take over the browser and force you to watch half a megabyte of full screen movie before you can even get to see what the site offers. Yeah, that's gotta fly well with both the potential buyers _and_ the site owners. Not.
Or see the RealNetworks retards. Yeah, buddy. Spamming the living hell out of me with popups, even when not using RealOne, surely will make me reach for the credit card and buy the premium player. Not.
Speaking of which: "Normal" people would never think, "I'm trying sell people stuff over the 'Net, so let's install spyware on their computers until it crawls, hog their bandwidth, spam them with popups, etc. And generally make it hard to use the very medium over which I'm selling stuff."
Gator, anyone? And a thousand others.
"Normal" people would never think "I'm trying to build a loyal fan base, so let's sell them a clearly non-tested non-functional product."
Yet, at least one game I've bought (Victoria from Paradox Entertainment, German version) threw up a script syntax error right on startup. FFS, not a crash, not a sound lockup, nothing even remotely blamable on my drivers or hardware. A script syntax error. Noone even started that game before selling it. Sad.
Basically IMHO the spammers are just a symptom of the complete lack of accountability or responsibility in this industry. The whole "if you can make a buck with snake oil, lies and deceit, go for it" mentality. Spammers are just the brute force/low IQ version of what everyone else is doing.
Until we stand up and say "no more!" to the whole snake oil deal, it will only get worse.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Instead of suing the customers, sue the guys who PAY the spammers to spam. Very few of these spamemrs are selling their own products...they're usually guns-for-hire for some website that wants to promote its product or service. So arrest the bastards.
It's against the law to hire someone to conduct an illegal activity in yout stead, you're generally charged with the same crime that person commits. (i.e. hiring a hitman gets you a nice fat murder trial) So...since states are making spamming illegal, by that logic, hiring a spammer is also illegal. This also opens up foreign website owners who employ spammers to extradition from friendly countries.
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