Microsoft Wins $3.95 Million from Spammer

LehiNephi writes "A Washington, D.C. judge fined Daniel Khoshnood, a major spammer, for pretending to be Microsoft in order to attract customers. Specifically, he registered windowsupdate.com (not to be confused with windowsupdate.microsoft.com), then sent out mass email encouraging users to download a toolbar from that website. Although the suit was not specifically about spamming, the mass emails (and subsequent complaints) were what caught Microsoft's attention. So far, Microsoft's campaign against spam has netted them $54 million from six judgments, one dismissal, four settlements, and two bankruptcies. The article doesn't mention whether the toolbar actually lived up to its claims of automatically applying security patches."

Comments

Re-distribute the cash?

[FyRE666]

Obviously it'll never happen, but it would be nice if all the proceeds of these victories against the scumbags were given to anti-spam projects and organisations to develop more robust hosting (to deflect spammer/virus author DDOS attacks) and improve the filtering software. It would also really annoy the spammers to see such projects getting massive cash injections ;-)

I recently added rbl support (spews and spanhaus), spamassassin and the mimedefang milter to our company incoming mailserver and it's REALLY making a difference! Since I have a corpus from hundreds of people too, the bayesian side is already extremely good. It still lets the odd scam through, but being a company I can't afford to block anything by accident.

Re:This is helping them more than most of their pr

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

While I have not RTFA here (hell, this *is* /.), I would also have tended to want to side with the Redmond lot on this one.

Registering a website with that name so he could send spam, he deserved all he got. What Microsoft do with the money is another matter.

This is an example of what I would consider fair use. Not sure that they have updated it in the last 10 years though :-)

So what?

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Like all fines that criminals get, this one will make little difference, and Microsoft will never collect.

These law suites are good for victim satisfaction, but will not stop spammers, and in both the large and small of things really have no effect at all on spam.

Re:Well, now we know why they're interested

[Zocalo]

How did this spammer, or any other spammer, directly hurt Microsoft?

Well Microsoft does get to pay Hotmail's bandwith bills, email storage costs, and employ people to deal with abuse reports? Don't forget that they also get to deal with all the spam that is undeliverable, bounced, or dropped by user's filters etc. Per individual spam, Microsoft may well be paying less than a recipient, but there is definitely a very real price tag attached.

Unfortunately however, under CAN-SPAM, only ISPs and not end-users can use the legislation to go after spammers through the courts. As the owner and operator of Hotmail that would naturally include Microsoft. Of course, the statement that the actions has "netted them $54 million" means the courts have awarded them that much, they will actually see far less of it than that.

It would certainly be nice if Microsoft (and others in a similar position) would make at least a token contribution to the anti-spam groups out there. Spamhaus operates almost entirely on contibutions and sponsorships, Spamcop has a legal defence fund, Spam Assassin is now under the auspices of the Apache Foundation... the list goes on.