Slashdot Mirror
Spammer Sentencing Guidelines Released
jfengel writes "The United States Sentencing Commission has issued its guidelines for punishment under the CAN-SPAM act (PDF, beginning on page 155). You can get 5 years for a second offense or if you're spamming for fraud, child porn or other felony, or 1 to 3 years depending on how much spam you send. If Congress doesn't say otherwise, it goes into effect November 1."
I completely agree with the spirit of the law. I disagree on how it's being implemented. The law should also go after the idiots paying the spammers to send their unsolicited verbiage. The current laws are completely toothless if the spammer decides to start sending spam from servers out of US jurisdiction. The companies offering the products or services clogging my INBOX should be fined/prosecuted as well. There is no incentive to stop spam as things are. There is incentive to find a spammer who will be out of jurisdiction. How long do you think it will be before the better financed spammers move their servers to India or elsewhere? How long before some entreprenurial Mexicans, Czechs or Russians decide to offer their services?
(Disclaimer: I'm Mexican. I speak Russian and spend a lot of time there. I'm familiar with their technical capabilities and motivations. So don't start on "why did he singled those nationalities out?" Because in my opinion it's likely to happen. You're welcome to your opinion based on YOUR experiences.)
When the law starts going after the product or service pushers, or their credit card payment processors, I'll cheer it. I doubt the law will be applied correctly until then.
Cheers,
Eugene
http://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
Do you have to be caught, let off scott free, and then caught again before anything happens?
Nope. That's just the top of three tiers. Bottom is one year. Here they are:
Up to five years and/or a fine for:
- Furthering another felony using spam
- Second offense. (Voilating state anti-spam laws also counts as first offense.)
Up to three years and/or a fine for:
- using cracked computers to send the spam
- using email accounts or domain registrations obtained with false i.d. info to send the spam
- Sending LOTS of spam: >2,500/day (24 hour period), 25,000/month (30 day period), or 250,000/year (1 year period).
- causing one or more persons to lose $5,000 or more within a one-year period. (I think this includes conning, system damage, and spam cleanup costs.)
- Obtaining anything of value totalling $5,000 or more within a one year period as a reslut of spamming. (I think this includes getting paid to spam.)
- Bossing three or more underlings to do the spam.
Up to one year and/or a fine for any other violations.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
there was an article on slashdot a while ago. so it must be true!
Joking aside, have a look at the list of Top 10 spammers
1: Alan Ralsky, U.S.A. (Michigan)
2: Scott Richter, U.S.A. (Colorado)
3: Alexey Panov, Germany
4: Tony Banks, U.S.A. (Missouri)
5: Chris Smith, U.S.A. (Minnesota)
6: Eddy Marin, U.S.A. (Florida)
7: Eric Reinertsen, U.S.A. (Florida)
8: Juan Garavaglia, Argentina
9: lmihosting.com, U.S.A.
10:Robert Soloway, U.S.A. (Oregon)
Have a look at the following graph showing the statistic of spam per day during the last year (thanks to Spamcop).
Clearly the CAN-Spam act did in no way reduce the amount of spam.
The 5 year and 3 year sentences are maximums set by Congress. A while back, Congress created the U.S. Sentencing Commission and laws that bound what a judge may do in a given case, based on the Commission's Guidelines. So, although a crime may be a 5 year felony, a judge can only sentence someone to 5 years if he meets the criteria set in the guidelines.
Congress was actually interested in pushing sentences up, because it wanted to appear tough on crime. Therefore, at the same time, it abolished parole for federal crimes. There is no parole for federal offenses, only a small amount of time off for good behavior, calculated through a formula.
The Guidelines end up working like Dungeon & Dragons. The crime has a base offense level, say 6. Then there are "enhancements" for various kinds of conduct. So, if you're caught (somehow) and used an innocent person's computer, you could get +4. If you use the word viagra, +1; if you misspell viagra, +2, etc. [Like, I'm wearing my leather armor, but my armor class is improved by 2 for my dexterity and 4 for my magic ring] See The Fraud Guidlines
A defendant also has a criminal history score, based on how many times he's been convicted before.
There's a table in the guidelines that cross-references offense level and criminal history to give a sentencing range in months. With a criminal history of I (they use roman numerals for the criminal history), you need an offense level of at least 11 to be certain of any actual jail time (because zone B sentences allow a convict to do "home detention"). See The Sentencing Table.
The thing is, I can't find what exactly the Commission has sent to Congress, i.e., the proposed offense levels and enhancements, so its hard to tell what the Commission has actually come up with. From what I can tell, they have decided to incorporate this offense into the the fraud guidelines. (according to this ZDnet story). The fraud guidelines are based on the amount lost and are notoriously squishy--because it is difficult to estimate exactly how much a given scheme cost.
Minn governor Jesse Ventura was once asked if there were any positions on the issues on which he had changed his opinion since becoming governor.
He said that the compulsory seat belt law he had come to support. He said that the state had to pay $80,000 for care for people who became wheelchair bound as a result of refusing to wear a seat belt and then having that accident that they claimed would never happen to them.
Thank you for taking the time to reply to my message. Most slashdotters would have just mod'ed it as low as possible.