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First Four People Charged Under CAN-SPAM Act
friedo writes "Four people in Detroit have been charged with emailing fraudulent sales pitches under the new federal CAN-SPAM Law. 'They were accused of disguising their identities in hundreds of thousands of sales pitches and delivering e-mails by bouncing messages through unprotected relay computers on the Internet.'"
Sadly, I doubt this will make any difference - they'll just forge more headers.
That won't even dent the problem. At least they're proving that their serious though, but unfortunately, I don't believe in every little helps in the case.
Aw, who am I kidding. Prosecuting people has never been a deterent to the crime.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Now we just need four convicted.
Who will be the first to blame the owners of said unprotected relays for our spam woes, as opposed to the spammers themselves?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
I don't think this will affect the situation in the short run. I do think that it is a step in the right direction. Perhaps new laws wont be too far off when its noticed that overall CAN-SPAM doesnt have a significant effect on the amount of SPAM; although it will have an effect on where its sent from.
"Capital punishment makes the state into a murderer. Imprisonment makes the state into a gay dungeon-master"
Seriously, save jail for violent offenders. There's not enough room as it is. Spammers may be annoying, but they won't mug you on the street and rape your kids.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
I just hope the penalty is severe enough to make CAN Spam economically unviable. Either way, I doubt it will stem the flow of Spam from China and Africa.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
let's say there is one murder per 50,000 in the population. let's say that the murder of this person affects 5 people (including the deceased) so badly that the rest of their life is ruined.
on average, this will happen to each involved at the midpoint of their lives (let's say).
So, in total, murderers remove roughly 1/5000 of life from each individual in society.
Do *you* spend more than 1/5000 of your life (roughly 20 seconds per day) dealing with spam? I do.
So, based on that (admittedly very rough) metric, who is worse?
Legally, this will never work. Why?
E.g. buy V1c0din from "HornyToad@hotmail.com" and get a 2000$ fine.
But you are not buying from "HornyToad@hotmail.com"; you are buying from Joe Schmoe via www.cheapdrugs.com. With spam, you never reply back to buy the stuff; you use an alternate method that's given to you in the spam email (such as a website). Unless the product you're buying is itself illegal, you can never be successfully prosecuted for buying it. Proving that you bought it because of a spam you received is impossible, and beside the point anyway.
Even though spam is the only method used to advertise the site, that's irrelevant. The site is there, and is offering a legal product. Anyone is free to visit it and buy whatever they want from it. The spam is the real problem, and can only be tackled directly.
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
Investigators said they consulted Dr. Michael D. Jensen, a medical professor at the Mayo Medical School, who confirmed that ingredients in the weight-loss product sold in the disputed e-mails wouldn't work.
Remarks about spamming itself aside... one has to question the means they are using to charge these guys. How ambigious is this law if the only evidence they needed was, not that they were spamming, but whether the product they were spamming was legitamite.
This proves that politicans don't really care about technology. If this idea were applied to drug law, dealers would get arrested for selling sitty coke instead of getting hit for just selling coke.
but then of course, all these guys are on crack anyways...
-B
The murderer! What, are you going to euthanize the stupid because they waste your time?
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
they pollute?
have the judge sentence them to a cleanup job for a few years. preferably something really stinky and disgusting.
slave labor, i know. but it should teach them a lesson, more so than being someone's b!tch in a federal PMITA prison.
This is a very difficult problem. As long as the web is so open and allows anyone to e-mail, this will keept happening. What we need is someone to build a new e-mail system, only run by certified players. That is secure, and all the e-mail is fully encrypted on the servers. Now should this not be a national concern? We already have the law makers on our side. So, techno geeks, have the patience to phone or actually! mail! That way we can no longer keept getting ignored. I bet you if all of us here at slashdot wrote to out government, we would make the news!! Come on people !! Lead the charge!! All we need is to get noticed, and to make bush and kerry realize they need to talk about these issues in public! Just because we don't watch TV doesn't mean we should get punished!
There is a case to be made that the CAN SPAM act is unnecessary, and that other laws cover spammers actions.
You could say that about a lot of feel good legislation that comes out of Washington and your state capital. Take my states ban on cell phones while driving -- we already had about a dozen laws on the books about distracted driving and people who had actually been cited under those laws for using their cell phone. But let's go one step further and add yet another law to the books (in an election year no less) because it was a popular issue and we need votes.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The CNN article is light on details, but I suspect these stories are related.
My wife is a bakruptcy attorney (in the Detroit area), which means she deals with the federal bar and federal courts, instead of local district courts. Anyway, one of her counterparts across town had an Exchange server zombied. Somehow I think having a pissed-off federal lawyer probably caused more action than the "10,000 complaints" from regular joes cited in the article.
I guess the morale is: If you're going to commit cybercrime, don't do it against a lawyer.
{ - Generic Guy - }
Oh, but they have. These are the two bit tech creeps that have several things that are attractive to Ralsky:
1. Technical knowledge. Ralsky is no technician. He's a sales man and business operator. He pays these guys to run his servers for him.
2. Foreign Language Skills: The Lins and Chung are obviously of Chinese heritage, and probably bilingual or trilingual to boot, able to correspond and communicate with the Chinese hosts who house Ralsky's servers (see this and this).
3. Young guys who can easily take the heat away from the master criminal in this case, Ralsky. Having a layer or two of personnel away from the kingpin is a classic way of lending plausible deniability for Ralsky. When asked if he knows any of the perps, he simply says, "I never saw them in my life." Bingo.
Now, instead of swooping in on Ralsky, you go after the little guys and get them to turn State's evidence in trade for an easier plea. The feds are doing this right: Approach the kingpin slowly via the little guys and *really* mount up the evidence against him, to make their own case against him *incontrovertible*.
As the owner of the negatives of Ralsky's house, I hope he fries, right along with the four other little fish.
Anyone up for a cookout??
Better to throw them in "court" based on a few million pieces of prima-facie evidence called "their spam."
Let's stop trying to make excuses; the government has utterly failed in its duty to prosecute blatant, obvious cases of egregious fraud (and many other kinds of criminal activity; pump & dump, illegal drugs, younameit) - that were broadcast to millions of Americans and reached more people than many TV shows.
And if they proceed in prosecuting people at this puny rate, I would say they are continuing to fail.
Yeah, sure, if we lock up all the domestic spammers, we'll still get spam from Africa and China, but let's actually get to that point first, and deal with it then.
I don't know about anyone else, but for many orgs I know spam is reaching a kind of crisis point, where anyone who has to publish their address is, within a matter of months, getting hundreds of spam for every few legitimate messages. It is rendering email useless.
A minor economic setback, I guess? Too trivial for the feds to bestir themselves?
CAN SPAM is a sad joke, but the punch line is that someone may have actually waited for it to go after these guys...
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