Slashdot Mirror
Siblings Guilty of Spam Felony, Partner Acquitted
saikou writes "According to AP Story (via SF Chronicle), brother and sister spammers just got convicted 'in the nation's first felony prosecution of distributors of spam,' while third suspect was acquitted. Jurors moved on to figuring out appropriate punishment (please, please, please give them some jail time. Pretty please). More spam cases for Virgina?"
I find it insane the amount of internet bandwidth that spam consumes. The harder we crack down on this sort of thing the less of a problem we will have. In sinapore a fellow got whipped with a cane a few times when he spray painted a car; I bet he won't be doing it again any time soon.
Agreed --- until the courts demonstrate that they believe spam to be a serious offence, the spammers will not be deterred. And I'm afraid that passing down a custodial sentence is the only way that will be demonstrated.
Is the editor seriously advocating jail time for spamming? I'm all for punishment, but I think taking every piece of property and dime of wealth is going to make a much bigger impact than sending them to a place that fosters the criminal mentality rather than reforming it. Reserve jail for hardcore felons that perform a physically harmful crime to someone else.
except in this case, the punishment is more for the fraud they committed, rather than just the presence of unsolicited junk mail. you advertise a product for $X and hundreds of people buy your product and it doesn't do Y as you promised, that's fraud. And that's probably why the punishments are as harsh as they are.
But we do give jail time to thieves. The spammers are stealing a portion of the bandwidth that I am paying for.
On one hand, I see 9 years in jail for sending nuisance email as excessive punishment, but on the other, they were making money committing fraud.
Since, however, they were tried simply on sending spam and NOT fradulent sales, I find this very disturbing. If the law they were being tried on was sending junk mail, does the content of the mail actually matter under this law? Why would the judge allow that information to be even considered?
It's kind of like trying someone for stealing a car, and saying it's a worse crime because he had a crack rock in his pocket. Unless the law stipulated stronger punishment for having drugs in a stolen car, it should be left out of the case.
Yes we need to crack down on online frauds, spam, worms, et al as much as the next guy but I really don't think that sending spam should carry (roughly) the same penalty as a rape conviction. Looking at these sentences our court is either saying "Sending spam is a horrific a crime as rape" or "Rape is no more worse than sending spam."
15 years is the sentence handed out in a rape & sexual battery conviction involving a minor. This doesn't sit right.If you read the article, this really was a case about FRAUD. The sentences were handed down heavily because they defrauded people of almost $40k. Spam just happened to be the medium they chose to do it in.
I really doubt that, had these folks run a legit business and didn't defraud people, that they'd have gotten such heavy sentences..
Anthony Papillion
Advanced Data Concepts, Inc.
"Quality Custom Software and IT Services"
What about theft? The total costs of spam are enormous, even without scams. Many, many millions of dollars per year.They suck up bandwidth and disk space, and waste millions of person-hours each year that could have bene used for something productive.
They steal bandwidth. They steal disk space. They steal our time, and time costs dearly. You can't replace it.
So until you can find a way to force them to pay restitution to everyone they've robbed, don't try to paint them as harmless.
Now add in scammers, pornographers, and all the other crap, and they deserve much, much worse than they're getting. What, you don't think porn matters? When it gets into my house, in front of me, or my wife, or my kids, it damn well matters. If you try to walk into my house and expose us to porn, you might very well leave in an ambulance if you aren't awfully quick on your feet.
That's because you don't run an ISP, or you haven't had your net connection terminated because a spammer got a zombie process onto your machine & started sending out spam.
There are estimates that at least 40% of all email being sent through the Internet is either spam or attempted spam. Think of how much wasted bandwidth that represents, and how much it costs to maintain the equipment! Are the spammers paying for all of that bandwidth usage? No, they're stealing it (in the straightforward it's-not-available-for-anyone-else sense of the word).
How about another cliche?
In one month alone, Jaynes received 10,000 credit card orders, each for $39.95, for the processor.
In other words, stupid is as stupid does.
10,000 people fell for it. Isn't that rather depressing? Ok, we probably saw vote counts for the election and wondered how so many people could be so wrong, but 10,000 people trying to order something for $40 advertised in spam, that tells you this isn't exactly a nation of rocket scientists.
You can't seriously fight spam until people stop being so damn stupid.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Theft can be as little as $0.01 and you'll get 30 days. It's classified as a misdemeanor until it reaches $500 in value, at which point it becomes a felony.
The costs come back to the user because the ISP has to pay for the mail servers, which have to be able to handle the incoming mail and filter systems which require more horsepower, etc. That cost comes down to the end user, so yes, that ~5MB/user per month can get real high real fast.
Imagine 1024 users, so now the spammer's utilized 5GB of bandwidth that they never paid for. And don't spammers hit like 10k+ people at a time.. that's 50+GB of transfer that they don't pay for and no one wants.
-What have you contributed lately?
WHat jail does is put a punishment onto spam. When its merely money, its a gambling game- odds of being caught*money lost-(1-odds of being caught)*money made>0? If so spam.
Now put in jail time- the equation changes. People don't want to go to jail. Where simple fines don't act as a major deterrent, jailtime does. The amount of money to be made has to be very high for jail to be worth the risk. Would you risk jail for 10K? I wouldn't.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Rape is generally accepted as being a horrible crime - everyone knows it's horrible, and normal people just don't do it. Basically if someone is committing rape, it's a good indication that they're eithor mentally unstable or otherwise are not considering the results of their action. The difference between 15 years in prision and like 50 years for rape would be pretty minimal, and keeping it shorter allows for some chance of the criminal becoming a useful member of society at some point in the future.
Spamming is a non-violent but financially costly crime. Since it's never been a criminal act before, the people doing it don't have an innate feeling that they're doing something wrong - they don't understand that society is going to *put them in prision* if they're caught spamming.
The absolute best thing that could happen here would be for the judge to rule that the spammers get FIFTEEN YEARS IN PRISION (quietly, under breath: with possibility of parole in 6 months with good behaviour). That will give us a headline that will scare some of the other spammers, but will wreck the fewest people's lives.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Yes, I do believe they should be jailed for property crimes.
What is to deter them? Just like oil companies, they are fined a fee that doesn't equate to a penny on the dollar for what they are raking in. That isn't even a slap on the wrist and is not even a deterrant for doing the crime.
I hate to say it, yes even as a Texan, a few examples must be made. And while I do not believe in the death penalty, I believe that spammers and anyone that writes/promotes or profits in anyway whatsoever spyware/malware/adware should be shot. Any time you spend feeling the guilt towards those individuals will be spent cleaning up the messes they've made.
Who cares about "wrecking" a spammers life? Seriously???
Also, note that the spam wasn't just spam... it was fraudulent spam that conned a lot of people out of a lot of money. Any con artist gets sent to prison. Why should a con artist who uses spam to perpetrate his scam get off lightly?
On the other hand... arbitrarily guaging sentences such as this just for the fear and shock value it will inflict on other would-be spammers is a negligent policy decision. Any sentence issued by the court should be meant to be carried out in full. If there are mitigating circumstances, that's where suspended sentence and parole should come into play.
I'm no fan of spam, but do we really need a special statute to deal with it? The people in this article used spam as a means to commit fraud. They should be tried for fraud. I don't care whether the fraud was an elaborate confidence scheme committed by a team of clever matchstick men going door-to-door pretending to take donations for the LDS, or some shmoe sitting in his parents' basement playing evercrack with one hand while lazily sending off spam with the other.(There's some nasty imagery in there somewhere) Fraud == Fraud... plain and simple. Spam is about pissing me off by filling my inbox with crap every day. What have I lost, really, by experiencing the email version of what I do every day when I come home from work.... sorting through the pile of mail trying to see if there is -Anything- even worth opening.
If some shmuck sends me email with "fraudulent and untraceable routing information," is my liberty affronted? If so, why?... because I can't easily reply? Of course I'll grant that spam is annoying, but so are infomercials... and calls from political parties... and people who drive neon yellow sports cars. Should we next tack on some fines for fraud committed while driving an ugly sports car?
Why waste time litigating the relatively meaningless incidentals when our public servants could focus on the core criminal act, resolve the issue, and move on to the next case in a more timely fashion?
It is?
In discussions like this, you have to start by establishing what the value/benefit of the prison system is. Is it to punish the criminals? Of course. But why?
Punishment in its own right won't undo many of the crimes that carry jail sentences. It's simply a sad fact that once a murder, rape, or other abuse has been committed, it's done, and nothing can change that. All you can do is try to prevent it happening again, by:
In the first case, you're talking about locking someone up for as long as it takes to mend their ways, potentially indefinitely. In the second, you're talking about providing a sufficient disincentive to prevent others feeling it's worth it to commit the crime.
In either respect, of course 9 years is far too long. These people aren't a danger to society; they're a pain in the arse. To encourage others not to be pains in the arse, a custodial sentence may be warranted, but throwing someone inside for 3-6 months should provide a sufficient kick up the backside for a first offence (on top of fining them 100% of the takings they made through the spamming, of course).
Something like 9 years is enough to destroy a life and make someone coming out turn to far darker things just to survive, which is not a productive use of the prison system from any point of view. Save long jail terms for the crimes so heinous that what we really want to do is lock someone up and throw away the key, where that scale of disincentive is required to inhibit further crimes by others, and keeping the perp off the streets for that long is necessary for public safety.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.