Texas Goes After Student Spammer

A number of people wrote in with this story: "Count Texas in the growing list of states fighting spammers with CAN-SPAM. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott filed the lawsuits today, charging a University of Texas student (and a cohort in California) with sending out millions of unsolicited commercial emails under the pseudonyms PayPerAction and Leadplex, among others. Spamhaus rates PayPerAction the #4 spammers in the world."

Comments

Re:annoying, but not fatal

[ScentCone]

Ah, another "we can't do more than one thing at a time" post. If we can seek to defend trees and whales and hungry people (and anything else "in decline," as you put it), all at the same time, why is defending the uncluttered use of the internet not viable? The rapid exchange of information, un-bogged-down by crap like spam, is a vital part of the productivity and efficiency that allows us the free time and resources to take care of "things in decline."

Look! I'm typing, drinking coffee, watching news about landing on Titan, reading slashdot, petting my dog, and using the internet instead of burning gas driving to an office all at the same time. Wreck the net, and I'm back on the road.

Re:How to end Spam...

[Halo-]

Actually, most politicians have "secret" personal accounts as well. My wife used to work at capital in DC. The main $congressman@house.gov account is monitored by staff, but there is usually also something nondescript like rxq223@house.gov which goes to them personally.

You'd also be amazed how many people you have heard of are reachable at some simple variation of $theirname@yahoo.com. When I was helping add a candidate's address book into a database, I had to keep asking if certain entries were a joke. (e.g. "you're kidding, I can mail Janet Reno at janetreno@yahoo.com and it's really her?!?")

(obviously I made all the email addresses in this post up, so don't try mailing them... :) )

State resources?

[catdevnull]

I wonder if the student used his student accounts and/or UT's bandwidth the propagate his spam? If so, that's a DOUBLE whammy!! The state could have his proverbial ass for misuse if they can't get him on the spam charges.

Re:How to end Spam...

[SilverspurG]

I think it is fairly safe to assume that if you have an email address, you get spam. Period.

But you shouldn't. It's a clear violation of consumer protection laws.

Take real world spam: junk mail. I've lived in my current location for less than one year. I've purposely misspelled my address on a number of forms (Holyhock instead of Hollyhock) just so that I could monitor junk mail. I have given the misspelled address to only a handful of places: three banks and my insurance carrier. I asked all of them, at the point of signup, if they share their databases with anyone else. The answer, of course, has always been "no". Guess what? I'm receiving junk mail at "Holyhock".

Electronic spam is no different. If you're getting spam it's because someone has violated their agreement not to share your information with anyone else.

Too bad the existing laws don't work for us--and new ones won't do any better.

Re:Yes,

[Anonymous Coward]

http://prisonpolicy.org/graphs/murderrates.shtml

Looks like they are underrepresented on death row, actually.

Spamming Countries

[Tom]

And before the usual trolls roll in to claim that most of the spam is from China and whatever:

Top 10 Spammer Countries

If you're too lazy to look, the US is 1st with over 3 times the score of the 2nd place, which is indeed China.

i work across the hall from leadplex

[hax0r_par]

We've known Leadplex were spammers since day one.

All these shady guys used to be walking in and out of Leadplex all day, it looked more like a drug ring than an actual business. I work over at Simpler-Webb and smoked a lot of cigarettes with the spammer guys. Most of them aren't intrinsically bad, but that Ryan guy (i'm assuming it was him) acted REALLY shady all the time. I went over to their company one day just 'looking for someone' and when he came to the door he seemed pretty freaked out someone he didnt know was coming to his office. For a while we thought it was a porn studio because they had so many fine girls going in and out of there all day, hell it might've been porn as well. Who knows. A week or so ago we say them moving a lot of boxes out, and a couple of days ago a camera crew showed up trying to get the spammers to come out and this was the first time we had ever seen the lights off in their office. Definetly shady stuff, hard to believe we work DIRECTLY across the hall from the worlds #4 spammers.

All in all, glad to see these guys getting put away, I need less spam in my mailbox for sure.