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$1 Billion Awarded in Lawsuit Against Spammers
phoric writes "In what is believed the be the largest federal judgement in history against spammers, an ISP from eastern Iowa was awarded a $1 billion dollar judgement against three mass-mailing companies, which were said to be sending up to 10 million e-mail messages per day to the small internet provider."
Will they share, after all I am a vicitm as well?
I'll believe it when I see it. Spammers have a way of packing up and vanishing from the face of the earth over night.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
That's a lot of money per email. When I saw the headline, I figured most of the money came from putative damages, but the article didn't mention it. Instead they were able to claim the amount from actual damages. This leads me to think that this law might not stick around for a while. It was also interesting that no lawyers were present for the trial.
all the V14GR4, fake Rolex watches, and mortgage refinances he can buy now!
This ruling is good.
But for every spammer eliminated, 5 more pop up to take their place. And the new ones are popping up outside the US, where US court rulings don't matter.
Nothing will change in the long run until the email protocols are changed to prevent spoofing and such.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
They should rather have the spammers flogged to the tune of one million whiplashes.
Much more effective. They can't pay the fine anyway, but they still feel the pain until they're a bloody mess.
Great, yet another reason that good old fashion American spamming companies are going to be outsourced to India.
...the ISP was contacted about the money through an email with the subject "YOU HAVE JUST WON 1 BILLION DOLLARS!!!" which they obviously deleted, and now they can't receive their money.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
Why not just work with credit card merchants. Many of these spams are for crap you can buy with a credit card.
...
So have police [or a taskforce] use specially marked cards [that otherwise appear like a credit card to the spammer]. Then when the merchant puts the transaction through their details are sent back to the task force.
e.g.
1. Get spam
2. Go there, buy shit
3. They try to collect with merchant
4. They then get a knock on the door a day later from the FBI or something.
Spammers already don't accept money orders and cheques [for obvious reasons] so let's make them afraid of credit cards as well.
And before anyone thinks this is entrapment step #1 takes care of that. They're selling to you without solicitation.
Aside from that I also really don't understand why spammers spam. I mean I don't know what a r0llex is, can't use any v1@gra and really can't afford a hom3 l0@n at the moment. So why bother emailing me over and over and over again.
I'm sure if I wanted herbal penis meds I'd already be in business transaction with the spammer anyways.
Oh well, can always just stop using email I guess.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that spamming is a first-amendment issue. It's not, and has never been a free-speech issue, it has always been a property rights issue. Spammers make their money by stealing service from millions of people.
Ralsky and the rest of his ilk are free to say whatever they want to say, but that does NOT include a right to use my computer/router/etc. to convey their message.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
What?
CAN-SPAM [iirc] defines spam as [other than unsolicited] email with fake headers. If you don't misrepresent yourself in email it's not technically spam as far as CAN-SPAM is concerned.
As for "if he was smart..." do you know how much spam public folk get? Fuck I'm just a small-time OSS developer and I get 100s of spams a day. I can only imagine what other big OSS developers, politicians, etc, get.
Even with a filter I have to at least look at the subject lines. For instance, I recently received an email from Joy Latten [from the linux center at IBM] which was first sent to my junk box until I marked it as not-spam.
What if it had been a job offer or other actually beneficial offer? I can't afford to just "delete all junk" without looking at the lines first.
And the problem isn't "oh block one IP and all your spam disappears". I tried that. A year or so back I had about 200 networks and 700 IPs in my ban list. And I still received a barrage of spam each day.
So yes, suing the larger spam operators is a good idea. It takes the profit motive out of the business. And really while I think spammers should be shot in the streets for ruining such a simple and effective communication medium I don't think prison time is the answer. Civil actions are enough.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Now this is how it is supposed to be done. Make them pay monetarily.
It has always puzzled me that crimes where the criminals make lots of profit, somehow get to keep that profit when they get caught and go to jail.
Surely a better deterent would be - you lose *all* the gross money you made from this illegal venture PLUS 50% (or $25,000 - which ever is more).
But then IANAL although if there are any lawyers out there, I'd love to know the reasoning why this cannot happen.
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
This argument reminds me of arguments like 'she asked for it' or 'well, you should have locked your doors'. Blaming the victim for not doing everything humanly possible to prevent the crime against them is one step away from anarchy. And make no mistake, this was a crime as defined by the law. The spammers thought that they had a small company that wouldn't and couldn't fight back. The spammers thought they would get away with it as they have always done. In this case the victim fought back. Shame on the spammers and hooray for the victim.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
The real problem is that more people need to make a bigger effort against spam. The US fines and stuff imposed on spammers doesnt really make that much of a difference to SPAM world wide. The majority of my spam is now non-us based for the first time in years. What can we do.. stop routing to those ISPs that have problems. revoke entire ranges of IPs. it will work.. make everyone on that ISP suffer will make the ISP change thier policy very very fast.
Got a question about UNIX ask it here : Unix/xBSD Forum
The question is probably moot since the spammers vanished before the case started. (They didn't didn't even send lawyers to the court.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Whether they were personally served or not is a different question. However, personal service is not required. They can even be "served" with the summons and complaint by publication in a newspaper if diligent attempts at personal service have been made.
Lack of personal service may make it easier for them to set aside the default judgment, but I doubt they will show up in court to make the proper motions.
No Inflation Taxation without Representation
Ok, so the spammers have to pay $1 billion for what they did. On the other hand Diebold only had to pay $2.6 million for writing bad voting software that potentially ruined the future of the country by allowing for voting results to be hacked?
There's something wrong with the way our legal system works, and more importantly this shows that people don't value their right to vote nearly enough. Spam seems so terrible to people because it annoys them on a daily basis, and yet no one is up in arms about their freedom to vote being insecure.
Come on people get the priorities straight...afterall there's decent antispam software out there, and even a small ISP can block people from sending spam through their servers if they are properly patched and up to date on security realeses. Damn, I only wish some spammers would take advantage of any holes I have now, then I could sue and be rich forever.
I followed the link and put in a fake name - a name I have never used anywhere else - but provided them with my real office phone number. Because it dealt with mortgages, I knew someone who had sufficient ties to my jurisdiction would respond if they wanted to sell me a mortgage.
I had over 40 fricking banks and mortgage brokers call me using that fake name! So what did I do? I sued the bastards.
Now, whether or not I believe them when they say that they didn't know that their leads were generated by spam, the judge in this particular case (who didn't know very much at all about the technology or economics of spam) said that, as a matter of law, they were not liable under my state's spam laws. However, before they were dismissed from the case, I was able, through discovery, to learn where they purchased those leads. So although I have dismissed the banks and brokers, I have named as defendants the companies who sold them the leads (which, I was surprised to learn, were also in my jurisdiction). My plan is to trace that fake name all the way back to the company that first sold it to somebody else.In seeing how much money these banks and brokers pay for leads, it is understandable why spammers take the risk of a judgment such as the one in this Iowa case - they are making money hand over fist!
No Inflation Taxation without Representation
I run my own mail server, so am I a ISP? Can I
sue these bastards for using my bandwith sending me unsolicited crap. What is the definition of ISP in reguards the the can spam act?
Got Code?
There are collection agencies out there who will pursue judgements against defendents who lose court cases. In this case, the ISP can identify the person or people behind each company with the help of ROKSO, spamhaus, and friends. He can then get the judgement directly named against them, then sell the judgement on. Collection agencies are bottom feeding scum, just like spammers, so they'll have no problem in mucking around the trailer parks of south florida.
Collection agencies will keep a percentage of the money recovered, anywhere from 20% to 90%, depending on the difficulty in getting the money. They are persistent, and tend to circumvent inconveniences like bankruptcies or moving from state to state. They'll grab money from a bank account, after showing the bank officer the original judgement, then let the defendent return to court to try and get it back. Habeus Cashus.
With a billion dollars in judgements, I would bet there are a handful of sleazy but effective collection agencies who will take on the debt knowing they'll be able to collect small amounts here and there for the life of the spammers. It all depends on grabbing the cash before the other agencies.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Fine.
Filter 'em out like I do with my own software and kwitchyerbellyaching!
If I still have to pay bandwidth fees to download my email (like I did when I logged on from Peru earlier this year, or like I would if I was paying by the megabyte for my internet pipe), then I'm still financially inconvenienced by having to do this.
This is no different than someone sending junk faxes to you - if you pay for the fax paper, then they have no right to abuse your fax machine.
Similarly, I pay for my internet service, my bandwidth and my computer storage space. Therefore the spammers have no right to clog any of those up.
Never mind the fact that filters don't work perfectly.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Don't be more of a fool than you have to be. He had enough email servers for his 5,000 customers, but he didn't have enough for the 10,000,000 emails per day they were receiving, and there's no reason he should have. He had no reason to expect that much incoming email, so he wasn't prepared for it. Not only that, the email wasn't just from those three companies. They were three of the offenders that he managed to identify and who didn't bother to contest his suit. Who knows how many other spammers were deluging him? For that matter, are there still suits open against other spammers that did show up? I don't know, and clearly, neither do you.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Eventually, however, my hatred for spam led me to file the complaint. The mortgage spams are so blatantly fraudulent ... misleading subject lines, messages that state outright that you are already involved in this fake company, and then you are led to a fake bank Web site with fake FDIC logos and Verisign security certificates - lies from end-to-end. (No Slashdotters are going to fall for this, but think of the grandmothers!).
And these companies, whether they realized or not, are funding this international criminal conspiracy. They should have fricken thanked me (and actually one or two of them did off the record).
No Inflation Taxation without Representation