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: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.

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.