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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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
$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.
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.
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.