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!!!
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.
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.
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.
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.