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The Family That Spams Together Stays Together
Anonymous Coward writes "The Globe & Mail has a story about an Ontario, Canada man who is being sued, along with his father and brother, by Yahoo under the CAN-SPAM Act. The Yahoo suit claims that Eric Head, along with his father and brother, were sending out millions of spam emails per month, as well as compiling lists of email addresses to sell to other spammers. Eric's company, Gold Disk Canada Inc., gathered lists of email addresses and sold them for $29.99 for 100,000 email addresses on up to $1,599.99 for 10 million addresses."
Ontario is in Canada. CAN-SPAM is a US act. This is Yahoo suing a spammer, the CAN-SPAM act is completely and utterly irrelevant.
In fact, IIRC, the CAN-SPAM act specifically prohibits individuals / companies from taking legal action against alleged spammers.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
10 million addresses for 1500 bucks... why not just sell harvesting tools and avoid prosecution? I can't imagine a world where I'd see a CD with 10 million e-mails on it and think, "wow, what a great buy!" and not think "wow, 10 million illegal violations of privacy!" They should make unauthorized email address distribution fineable at $1000 per offense.
stuff |
If everyone who owned a website posted thousands of bogus email addresses, then spammers harvesting efforts would quickly become useless. It should not be too hard to litter the web with billions of false e-mail addresses on bot-finadable pages.
The more enterprising site and mail server owners could even create semi-real bot email addresses that simply forward all emails to authorities. Even better, the mail server might first appear to "look at" spam by using an automated process to appear to fetching the coded JPGs that tell the spammer they have a live address. After the spammer thinks they have a good address, all further email would be sent directly to authorities.
This could be a DDoP (Distributed Denial of Profits) attack on harvesters and spammer. By creating ten to a hundred times the number of bad addresses as good addresses, we could reduce profit per spam by a factor of ten to a hundred and create a massive stream of data samples for authorities to use to catch spammers.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Eric was a friend-of-a-friend who, according to my friend, had his own "business". Having heard rumours that he was spamming, and having met the guy, I'm not the least bit surprised. He and his high school friends used to run a site called me6 (which seems to be defunct now) that had video of them doing jackass type stuff.
I do find it really neat to have met a spammer - I only regret that I didn't know it when I met him. I'm not violent, and don't condone that, but I would have loved to find some sort of ironic justice for him.
Time to get those catalog & magazine subscriptions filled out again. Has anybody figured out these guys snail mail address yet?
The people you have to fight are the big bosses. In the case of Spam, the IDIOTS who try to sell their products and services through spamming. If more action is taken to prosecute these [deleted expletives], we will be able to combat spam better.
Indefinitely Detained US Citizen
Believe it or not, Canada and the US have a variety of agreements on cross-boarder enforcement. IANAL, but this is a civil matter, not a criminal one, so extradition isn't relevant.
As I am sure all Americans know, you don't have to break a law to be sued. US businesses sue Canadian businesses all the time. I am from the Kitchener area myself, and the CBC legal analyst being interviewd said that Yahoo will have some legal hurdles, but will at the very least get them into court.
It's really not that much money. Most of the time, the spammers act as third-party advertisers - other companies hire them to send out advertisements for whatever crap they're selling at the moment. And when the spammer tells the company, "Oh yes, we can GUARANTEE that word of your company will reach over 200 million email inboxes," the company's eyes just turn into little dollar signs. That initial payment, combined with the low cost (it doesn't take that much effort to send emails, right? And lots of programs probably exist that allow you to mass email easily) makes for an overall profit for spammers. And that's why they should all be shot. Hopefully in the knee.
"By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth." - George Carlin
provided no one publishes what they actually put in their product.
Pork shoulder, ham, salt, water, sugar and sodium nitrate.
Though no one's really sure that's all they put in it. As one of thousands of haikus on Spamhaiku goes:
A worker threatened
to tell what's in SPAM; now he
sleeps with the fishes.
...
And even IF it were true that most spammers were offshore, most retailers who employ spammers would be from inside the US because it's not cost-effective to charge customers for international shipping. So legislation isn't a dead-end with regards to spam, especially since there's a credit-card paper trail to follow.
I also live in Ontario.
80% of my incoming mail is spam.
If there's a lawsuit going on, I want in on it.
DJ kRYPT's Free MP3s!
Everyone is so quick to jump on the wagon on this, but these guys aren't being sued for spam(right?). I'd be for that; that's what's truely wrong. If you go out and harvest email addresses and try to correlate them to physical addresses and people, that's what tons of businesses do: M$, yahoo, the US govt, NY times, etc. Companies sell this information for huge amounts. But everyone here is just all ready to jump over some mom and pop shop and totally forget about the real data mines being developed. It seems it's getting easier and easier for the powers at be to pass laws designed to keep anyone from entering into thier space.
.deb package it up.
In a way, I'd almost rather have it that the databases were something under the GPL. That would kill this whole industry and put the people back in control. Someone should start a project like this before that "Copywrite Databases" Law gets passed. Think: take all the information from phone books internationally, correlate with as much as possible, pump into postgresql,
Jeff