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Massachusetts Atty. General Forces Spammer to Pay
Cildar writes "The Attorney General of Massachusetts has forced a Florida spammer to pay a $25,000 fine and enter into a cease and desist order. The original suit contained both state consumer protection theories as well as allegations of CAN-SPAM violations. Here is the Attorney General's press release.
I don't think these court "settlements" slow this guy down at all. He was also successfully sued and ordered to pay $104,104 this past April. You can read about that case here. I am wondering if it is the case that he makes so much money sending spam that these fines and settlements are no more than the cost of doing business.
http://www.busyweather.com/
Its a small start, but public stoning would be a more rewarding payback for those of us who stayed many late hours updating our spam filters.
Like Ebaums World? You'll love Shizzville
Its good to see that the can spam act is actually taking some action, along with the governments. However I bet if the spammer had to pay just 50 cents for every email they sent, they would be fined in the millions.
Trouble is, the chickenboner will only be able to pay with KFC coupons...
Lex Talionis, the principle of an eye for an eye, is a morally bankrupt code of law we've been moving away from for the past few thousand years, thankfully. It can't deal with the complexities of the modern legal order, and it ignores all proper justifications for systems of punishment: rehabilitation, prophylaxis, etc. It makes an assertion of rigid judgment in an attempt to avoid judgment itself. We can't live in a world without judgment.
Ask yourself this: should we rape the rapist? If not, why not? (Ignore for a moment that we essentially do rape rapists by committing them to so-called "maximum security" prisons where they get systematically brutalized and raped by guards and other inmates.) It's not a morally tenable position to lower ourselves to the level of brutes just so we can vindicate some idea of retribution.
Therefore, ask yourself why we should be happy when the spammer gets spammed? No one should have to endure the pain and annoyance of spam: it's the scurge of the online world. Not even the spammer, who may be in his business because of factors outside his control like debt or bills for an illness in the family, etc. We should be outraged when anyone is spammed, and we should put the full force of the state and the law against the perpetrator no matter who the victim! Picking and choosing among which victims to protect is something the legal order of former barbaric times did. I'd be disgusted if our government returned to those days.
Spam == bad. Victimization == bad. Why do people conflate the two? What kind of giddy moral superiority to you get from seeing anyone hurt?
I think he can then do his thing. Well, maybe he can use Gator to remember his passwords.
Waste these assholes...
Why did he settle instead of going all the way?
Spammers spam because they think they have the freedom to spam, and the only way to stop this is to take away their freedom, ie some jail time.
Failing that, I thought the fine is a bit small, but sooner or later, people will find the "threshold" fine to impose, which basically make the whole spamming business unprofitable.
Now if only they would seize all his computers and find all of the tools he used to send all this spam.
Most likely, he's used the benefit of spyware to send this bs out. It would be really nice to make those results public, so it would shed a better light as to why we should protect against that crap...
--- "To ignore race and sex is racist and sexist!" -- Jesse Jackson
Not providing an opt-out link is not allowed under CAN-SPAM, and if the link doesn't work, then they can be fined. Great. BUT when other spammers have the opt-out link generate an attack on your machine, is the opting-out link something the lawmakers want to champion as real enforcement of the law--ostensibly making us better off?
Intil consumers have a private right of action as one exists in the telemarketing laws (Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 47 USC 227) then the CAN-SPAM or anything else will be toothless. The TCPA gives consumers the right to sue in small claims court for violations of the law and subsequent federal regulations. I have another hearing soon sgainst a local mortgage company that made a single, prerecorded call to my residential line. I have demanded a total of $5000 in damages (statutory damages of $500 per violation [with 6 violations] and trebled due to defendants willful or knowingly violation of the law) since that is my local court limit as well as will be demanding an injunction. This is just one person's action. If just a few more people knew their rights and enforced them, the mortgage could be taken out of business for even a single illegal telemarketing campaign or until they declare bankruptcy. Serves them right I feel, IMHO.
Cave, wreck, and deep diver.
I told him not to move to Florida until the Massachusetts southern boudary is determined.
"An eye for an eye" is an advanced, progressive, touchy-feely principle made popular by Hammurabi about 6000 years ago.
No, not O'reilly. Tom Reilly, the MA Attorney General.
He's been on a virtual warpath against corporations. He didn't back off like all the other states did in the case against Microsoft. He took on the Catholic Church, and sent them running for cover. He's been a non-stop machine against corporate greed and corruption, and it's about damn time. We need a lot more state AG's like him.
I have a feeling he has aspirations for being federal attorney general. Long as he keeps up his current record of corporate ball-busting, I'm all for it. Yet another reason to vote for Kerry, I see it- Bush is quite happy with Ashcroft, and I doubt Ashcroft would last very long under Kerry. Somehow, I don't see Ridge lasting long either.
Pretty sad when you loose an election to a dead person and get slotted right into a high ranking, federal executive position you're not even remotely qualified for.
Please help metamoderate.
is all the Mass action is.
$25,000, from what has been reported as spammer income in other stories linked from here on slashdot is less than a day's profit. The Mass. AG did the same thing the NY AG did, grab headlines to promote himself for future office, and tuck away an action against a popular cause.
If the intention was to stop the spamming, the fine would have been higher, the AG would have forced the spammer to give up the mortgage brokers who are paying the spammer affiliate commissions for the leads, and the AG would have revoked the licenses of the mortgage brokers.
But the mortgage brokers have friends in high places, and well placed campaign donations.
Follow the money. Pull the licenses of the mortgage brokers. Pull the licenses of any other individual or company who pays a spammer affiliate money, commissions, or any other types of payments based on results of spamming. Delist public companies that pay spammers and fax.com in cash and stock to blast fax and spambomb advertisements to promote and raise awareness of their penny and dollar stocks.
$25,000? A mosquito bite. The spammers are laughing at the Mass AG right now.
That does look pretty cut and dried that they are not deductible.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
... making spammers pay.
What's next? Respecting the constitution?
It never ends.
George W. 4 more years of what?
I think this would be very fitting punishment for a spammer.
There are two kinds of fool. One says, This is old, and therefore good. And one says, This is new, and therefore better.
Spammers should have to pay the ammounts they display in their emails when its one of those emaisl that says youve won like 1.4 million dollars, it should be fair to force the spammer to pay you that money.
If slashdot lefties are gonna talk the haughty talk of the lawyer, at least get it right. You can't 'enter into a cease and desist order.' You can enter into an agreement to cease and desist, but not the order itself.
Dawn of the Dead
i know you didnt mean it and i dont want to say this in a bad way but stoning is a serious problme for some people in different parts of the world eg arabic. can you say it is right to stone a women for abortion or things which we take for granted here? please dont joke about such things or at least use the smiling face (like :) to show people that you understand.
The credit to Microsoft for assistance is interesting. They're clearly taking more than one approach to attempt make good on their "stamp out spam" promise.
This particular tack is one that MS is uniquely positioned for, given their rather strong contacts in government (hmm) and impressive financial and personell strengths.
Hell, I wish 'em luck. It'd be nice if they'd stop with the "gain control of eMail" angle, but this approach is useful. Even if it's not overly effective or efficient, it'll be one more thing that makes spamming less worthwhile, and that can only be good.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
$25,000 to this guy is as remarkable as your first time was to you.
I am a true conservative. I am such an old-school Republican that I cannot in good conscience vote for Bush this year. (I can't vote for Kerry, either: voting for the lesser evil is still evil.) I think John Ashcroft is the most dangerous attorney general we've had since Bobby Kennedy (the man who plotted the murder of foreign leaders, e.g., Castro).
So, since I pass your political litmus test, let me inform you of some things you apparently missed in elementary school:
Beating people up is wrong.
Mrs. Lawton made sure my kindergarten class knew that. Mrs. Boettcher made sure the next year that the slow learners got it repeated, and Mrs. Hesse the year after that, Miss Cleveringa the year after that, and on and on and on. It was repeated so often because it is important.
Say it with me now: beating people up is wrong.
It doesn't matter if you think the person is as innocent as the driven snow or if you think they're a loathsome human being. It doesn't matter if it's John Kerry or John Ashcroft. Beating people up--and that includes snide, offhand, inaccurate and ad-hominem remarks--is wrong.
Period.
So no, I don't agree with you. I'll continue to defend John Ashcroft against unfair, unwarranted and asinine "criticisms". I'll do this because I hope you'd do the same for me. I'll do this because I hope John Ashcroft would do the same for me. I'll do this because there are people out there who don't know that beating people up is wrong; and by making a stand for what is right, maybe they'll learn.
I don't know how you got modded +2 Insightful. I really don't. I'd like to think that all of us here have at least the basic moral development of a kindergartener.
This is good news. Although we can only hope that this is a start of things to come. With the high level of SPAM coming from the US (based on spamhaus stats http://www.spamhaus.org/ ) If more fines are to come for US based spam operators hopefully other countries will follow suit. (as seen with recent Australian legal developments).
The biggest issue here is this is only the tip of the ice berg. And a one off wont do enough to scare spammers. Its all about volume and consistancy.
How active is UC? I send an email to the creator some weeks ago, but no reply yet. It looks very good, but I don't have the feeling it is in active development.
Filling out bogus data at spam-sites has been a very popular method to fight spam. Some weblogs in the Netherlands make a sport out of it. Works quite succesfully I might add, as the few dutch spammers are quite inactive nowadays.
So let me see if I understand this ... the court settlement prohibits the spammer from doing stuff that he's prohibited from doing anyway. How useful.
The first one looks rather clever; I like the idea of feeding them useless sign-ups. The second looks to me like it can be trivially defeated.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
You're an abrasive asshole.
Reform!
Maybe Tom (the Massachusetts Attorney General) is going to need to recruit an army of unskilled work-from-home people hoping to get-rich-quick by taking their cut in collecting the unpaid moneyary fine imposed by the court?
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Time and again, it would just accelerate the spamming (since the spammer now had a bona fide working email address) or, at worst, generated an immediate attack on your machine/network.
That's like teaching your dog that peeing on the floor is bad by whacking him with a rolled up newspaper. Then you change your mind and decide that if he wants a biscuit, he has to pee on the floor first....
Cheers,
It rises above the basement-level spammer, but it would make sense to me that these people invest some money into legal advice and setup a series of shell companies with obfuscated ownership so that if they run afoul of some law, company A can declare bankruptcy and skip out on some of the fine and (possibly new) company C can take over.
Civil fines presume that you're dealing with businesses that are basically honest. I think people involved in spammer are basically dishonest, and while a few that operate as sole proprietorships will pay fines and be "watchable" by government agencies. Even major corporations largely just pay the fines, raise their prices, and ignore it.
This is part of the reason I think civil fines will never work with spamming, only criminal fines and lengthy prison sentnces from RICO-type investigations that follow the money trail and catch everyone participating in the enterprise, including any "legitimate" businesses aware of the nature of the business.
If a credit-card processor and/or an ISP that knew about the nature of their client's business was indicted, fined $250,000 and jailed for 10 years in a Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison, the ties to banking and interest services that spammers need would be hard to come by in the future as ISPs and credit card processors who otherwise have a viable business wouldn't be willing to host spam or run spam credit processing -- even at 10x fee rates, it's not worth losing your home and spending the next 10 years dodging the Aryan Brotherhood in the shower.
What bothers me is why, given the high level of fraud in spam, the Feds haven't done much to follow the money trail. Either the money is too good for legit players on the sidelines and enforcement has become politicized ("Investigate us and we don't contribute to your boss' campaign.") or they just don't care.
Try running
echo "Main-Class: Commando" > manifest
jar -mcf manifest uc.jar *.class
That's all you need to add to make your program easy to run on any platform with java. Easy to run meaning double-clickable or runnable with java -jar uc.jar.
Until we see spammers getting jailtime, you won't see an end to the practice. Spam is profitable. It's just that simple.
If you structure things right, the corporation that sends the spam is renting all their hardware from your virtual hosting company and hiring snailmail fulfillment services from your shipping company, so if they get busted you express that you're shocked, shocked to find AUP violations being perpetrated by *your* customers and send them an angry note cancelling their services, while running the perl script that creates a clone with a different name to sell the same worthless junk.
Following the money trail requires there to be enough money that's easily confiscated and no jurisdictional borders in the way. Usually the trail leads to some loser in a trailer park, or some server in China rented by some bogus entity. If it does lead to one of the ROKSO Top 200 spammers, it probably ends up with some disposable corporate shell that can go bankrupt rather than getting the real spammer.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
One of the rather interesting facts of life about the US Court system is that Judges have powers within their courtrooms that are very close to those exercised by despotic monarchs two centuries ago. Here's how it works:
Attorney General gets a judgement for the plaintiff (the State or the Federal Government). The judgement is pretty light and totally within all sentencing guidelines. The judgement is not what's important.
What you have here is a trap.
If the spammer was truly forced by the judge to agree to live by the Court's order to not violate federal and state laws as a part of the guilty verdict (or a plea of guilty), the trap is set. Should Mr. Spammer ever, in the judge's eyes, violate his solemn promise to do no wrong in the future, he may be held in contempt of court. And in contempt issues, the judge gets to become a Royal Despot, handing out a bench warrant for the man's arrest and forcing the violator of a direct order of the Court to await the pleasure of the Court in any way the Court wishes.In other words, dear reader, there are no pesky Federal, State or local sentencing guidelines, no rules, no laws, just what the judge thinks will work. And that may include many years behind bars (being someone's woman) as well as fines that are astronomical (like $500,000 for each UCE found by the Attorney General henceforth to be in violation of said Court order. And that's something that could bankrupt the fool.
So I regard the announcement for what it truly is, a set trap.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.