Slashdot Mirror
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."
...I mean, we are talking Canadian dollars aren't we? :p
Spam doesnt fall far from the spam tree.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/12/172622 1&mode=thread&tid=111&tid=126
Christ, its from yesterday even.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Please let one of them be called 'Richard'...
CAN-SPAM is not going to make a difference in the light that 40% of global e-mail is spam.. and a lot of it comes off American shores..
Every little helps i guess..
Simon.
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.
because this is one set of genes I'm sure we all don't want in our genepool..
"ewww.. Spammer DNA... Gross!"
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
Oops! Look at that! I dropped a CD with 5,000 e-mail addresses! (Flash required)
wow... i never realized how cheap the addresses were. i had always hoped my address would be like worth $1. I guess I should have hoped for a penny for my address. I feel so used.
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 |
The spammers are in Ontario you say? The spammers are SELLING personally identifiable information (e-mail addresses) you say? I'm not an expert...oh wait, I am...without the consent of the address owners, this guy is in clear violation of PIPEDA (the new, federal privacy act). Patrick
I wonder if they posted a reply to the recent Ask Slashdot question about "A Family IT/Tech Business"?
NEARLY UNLIMITED EMAIL ADRESSES FOR FREE!
Here's a small sample of our list!
Order now! No satisfaction, NO REFUND!
Hate me!
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.
I'm kinda wondering whether my email addresses came in the cheapo $29.99 version, or if I qualified for the $1599.99 Deluxe package...
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
I say we go one further...not just the death penalty, but they die by being fed feet first into a wood chipper. That MAY server as a deterent.
Liberalism...the next best thing to thinking.
Euh, what do you want to say with that figure? You are multiplying the price of 10 million addresses with the total spam e-mail per year. That would give you:
$/address * SPAM/Year
Which resolves to something like dollarspam per addressyear. What the hell is THAT?
-- The Internet is a too slow way of doing things, you'd never do without it.
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.
Wow, that's a lot.
That's equivalent to every single person on the planet receiving over 3 trillion spams per second.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
The Yahoo suit claims that Eric Head, along with his father and brother...
Please tell me that they're named Dick Head and Shit Head so I can know that I've been yelling the right names at my computer screen this whole time.
CAN-SPAM applies, and of course US law has extraterritorial effect.
As for our end of things, laws extend as far as the counstitution (due process) allows. On the foreign end, they may be *practical* problems such as getting physical custody (extradition), seizing assets, collecting evidence, but the US and Canada are on very good terms and have one of the most significant economic relationships in the world -- we can work it out. Also, if the defendants have violated the act and we can't reach them, they may still have reason to regret it -- and US assets might be forfeited and they might not want to visit. They can also be subject to suit in absentia -- if they refuse to show up on proper notice and jurdiction, they may lose their defenses.
Jurisdiction derives from the domestic effects, you can't just hide on the other side of the border. The classic example is that if you shoot someone across the border, you are subject to the jurisdiction; yes this applies to fraud and other intangible offenses like the Nigerian scams. Again, the problems are practical. About CAN-SPAM. The practical problems in enforcing it are HUGE, but clearly the theoretical jurisdiction exists. Also -- it seems a bit implausible to suppose that Yahoo's lawyers missed so many first-year law classes that they didn't catch any of this.
As for who may sue -- the law in enforceable by the FTC, civil action by the states, and not individuals but ISP's (here, Yahoo):
(f) ACTION BY PROVIDER OF INTERNET ACCESS SERVICE.--
(1) ACTION AUTHORIZED.--A provider of Internet access service adversely affected by a violation of section 5 may bring a civil action in any district court of the United States with jurisdiction over the defendant, or in any other court of competent jurisdiction, to--
(A) enjoin further violation by the defendant; or
(B) recover damages in an amount equal to the greater of--
(i) actual monetary loss incurred by the provider of Internet access service as a result of such violation; or
(ii) the amount determined under paragraph (2).
(2) STATUTORY DAMAGES.--
(A) IN GENERAL.--For purposes of paragraph (1)(B)(ii), the amount determined under this paragraph is the amount calculated by multiplying the number of willful, knowing, or negligent violations by an amount, in the discretion of the court, of up to $10 (with each separately addressed unlawful message carried over the facilities of the provider of Internet access service or sent to an electronic mail address obtained from the provider of Internet access service in violation of section 5(b) treated as a separate violation). In determining the per-violation penalty under this subparagraph, the court shall take into account the degree of culpability, any history of prior such conduct, ability to pay, the extent of economic gain resulting from the violation, and such other matters as justice may require.
(B) LIMITATION.--For any violation of section 5 (other than section 5(a)(1)), the amount determined under subparagraph (A) may not exceed $500,000, except that if the court finds that the defendant committed the violation willfully and knowingly, the court may increase the limitation established by this paragraph from $500,000 to an amount not to exceed $1,500,000.
(3) ATTORNEY FEES.--In any action brought pursuant to paragraph (1), the court may, in its discretion, require an undertaking for the payment of the costs of such action, and assess reasonable costs, including reasonable attorneys' fees, against any party.
So you're telling me there are 6*10^29 spam messages sent out every year? The average year has 365.2425 days IIRC, which assuming no leap seconds means 31556952 seconds in a year. That works out to approximately 1.9*10^22 spam messages per second. The IPv4 address space has (far) fewer than 4294967296 available addresses. That means that each second, the average Internet-connected computer is sending out more than 4426865629872 spam messages. That's 4.4 trillion spam messages per second from every node on the network, including the billions that don't even exist.
Which leaves me three questions:
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
Spammers profit no matter how much mail they have to send, and no matter how many of those email addresses are bad. The bandwidth costs to send out hundreds of millions of emails is basically nil, compared to what they make back on sales to those poor people dumb enough to actually buy the products they're advertising.
Not true. While, spammers do make money at very low rates of return, reducing the rate of return would hurt them. If spammers get 1/10 or 1/100 the number of clickthroughs, they will feel that.
Even if spammers use zombies to send mail, that resource is finite. If spammers find they need one hundred times as many zombies to get the same number if idiots to buy their junk, it will impact them.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Just wondering what a major spam offense gets you in punishment once proven guilty...
Perhaps making them dig anything and everything they need out of a pile of useless shit for the rest of their lives is fair... you know 50 tv remotes but only one of them has batteries.. stuff like that all over their houses.
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)
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.
...
I've been feeding spambots bad addresses for months and months now. They keep coming back for more and more. I've probably fed them millions of addresses. I'm hoping that those CDs contain mostly the garbage addresses I (and hopefully thousands of others) am/are feeding them. I do this via websites, at URLs that bots should leave alone (via the robots.txt file), via links that people can't see. I figure disobedient robots should be rewarded with infinite garbage. I'm using a souped-up version of Infinospam.pl, which belches forth megabytes of fictitious email addresses, Shovel.pl, which generates tons of garbage mixed with half complete mailto: urls, and SpamThis.pl, which takes the originating IP address of the request, and looks it up in the whois databases, and feeds back a series of disguised emails that are their own. I also see that there is another called wpoison available, that looks pretty good, and uses a pretty large dictionary. Like infinospam, it will generate a mix of mailto:, regular text, and links pointing to itself (in disguise), and is a cgi perl script. If enough people do this, the CD's that are for sale to spammers will be largely worthless.
Strong bad gets $0.25 per e-mail!
Ugh, I think I broke my calvicus...majoras.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
A ton of us are Canadian, let's go picket their homes and businesses (the security company they run), and visit all their neighbours and their security company's clients and hand out flyers.
Maybe first we should get a friend in law enforcement to check the gun registry first, just to make sure that they don't have a stack of guns inside their front porch. And a criminal background check too, to make sure they're not the type that's "quick to anger and resort to violence".
Shoot, I'd put in $100 to put a **big-ass** ad in the area paper with their pictures saying "SPAMMERS WHO LIVE IN KITCHENER" along with links to relevant documentation and excerpts. (I'd want to be sure that any such act was adequately *solid* - ala "the truth" is the best defence against defamation and the like...)
Us law does not have any meaning in canada.
Yeah, right. Dmitry Skylyarov tried explaining that theory about laws designed to protect US corporate interests not applying to people in other countries to the FBI. Some of the guys in Guantanamo tried explaining that theory to the guards as they pulled orange sacks over their heads and cinched the tie-wraps around their wrists behind their backs a little tighter too. US laws apply to everybody on the planet now, and if you don't agree, then GW Bush will get preemptive strike on your ass.