First Arrest Made in U.S. For Spimming

prostoalex writes "U.S. federal authorities have conducted the first arrest for spimming. Eighteen-year-old Anthony Greco was arrested for sending spam to instant messenger users of MySpace.com." From the article: "Greco had allegedly threatened to share his methods for spamming members of the group if MySpace.com didn't sign an exclusive marketing deal that would have legitimized the messages he was sending via the service."

Comments

Re:I'm not normally a spelling Nazi...

[Impeesa]

Spim = instant messaging spam, for those that don't know.

Re:I'm not normally a spelling Nazi...

[glitch0]

Its not spelled wrong, spimming is the act of spamming through instant messages.

He wasn't arrested for Spimming...

[ackthpt]

He was arrested for extortion.

Re:He wasn't arrested for Spimming...

[DaFallus]

From TFA: Assistant U.S. Attorney Brian Hoffstadt confirmed the arrest was the first criminal case brought against an individual sending spam over IM.

That doesn't mention extortion. Also, according to the LA Times: Greco agreed to fly to Los Angeles to sign a contract and was arrested when he arrived Wednesday. He was charged with violating a federal anti-spam law, harming MySpace computers and attempting extortion.

Re:I'm not normally a spelling Nazi...

[killawatt5k]

actually Spim appears to be SPam on IM. I just recently started getting spam on Myspace. I'm not to happy about that.

Luckily....

[GillBates0]

most IM clients let you restrict incoming IMs only to those originating from people in your Friends list. And most people (in my experience) aren't interested in receiving IMs from anybody outside the list (atleast those of us who use IM mainly as an alternative to phone calls to friends/relatives).

IMHO until somebody figures out a way to spoof IM headers to make them look as if they're coming from somebody else, spimming is going to be far less of an annoyance than email spam.

Re:Freedom of Speech

[ppenrod]

"I hate getting spam/spim as much as the next guy, but at some point, aren't we letting our zealotry against spam erode the First Amendment? I may not like spam, but I realize that the First Amendment was designed to protect speech I don't like."

No.

The first amendment says Congress shall make no law abridging the right of free speech. It does not say I am required to listen it or read it.

Re:WTF is Spimming?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is Spim?

Some 42% of America's 134 million online adults use instant messaging and almost a third of those instant message users have gotten "spim" - or unsolicited commercial instant messages. That translates into nearly 17 million adults who have gotten the instant-message version of spam.

Re:Freedom of Speech

[SquadBoy]

The correct comparison is not to Larry Flynt and this is why teh First Amendement argument doesn't really hold water.

The difference is really simple. Larry and the spammers/spimmers should both have the right to publish whatever they want to. But Larry has no way to, *force* me to view what he publishes. I have to get out of my chair, go to the store and exchange money to get it. OTOH spammers/spimmers both shove it down my throat. Thanks to fine tools like SapmAssassin and a very aggresive .procmailrc I manage to avoid most spam sent my way. I'm guessing it's slightly harder on a phone and of course most people don't know how to use those tools. The correct comparison is a salesdroid knocking on your door and if you don't answer trying to yell his "message" through the closed door. And that is not and should not be protected.

In short the problem is not that the spimmers are saying the things they are saying. It is that they are forcing you to listen. Which is a bad thing.

CAN-SPAM claim is really dodgy

[billstewart]

One of the press releases contends that IM is really just about the same as email, so CAN-SPAM email rules should apply. I'm sorry, but that's bogus, and including it in this case appears to be intended to give the public a negative opinion of the accused person. While SPIM is certainly an annoyance, and at least as annoying as spam (with fewer tools to block it with), and the spimmer really does deserve the same social disdain that sleazy spammers get, that doesn't mean that it's appropriate to use that badly-written law to cover cases that it didn't cover, and probably some or most of the "18 years" are from that.

Similarly, just because the victim company abused the capabilities of the MySpace service to create lots of free accounts and spim from them, and cleaning up those accounts cost them money, that doesn't mean that the miscreant actually damaged their computers, and the legal doctrine of a "protected computer" is badly thought out and may not apply here. That doesn't mean that the sleazy spimmer didn't violate Myspace's terms of service (I haven't read them, but I'd hope they had the sense to write them in a way that his abuse was a violation), but that's something that ought to be a civil cost recovery issue, not a crime.

On the other hand, if you can believe the press release, the extortion part does sound like a legitimate criminal complaint, as opposed to mere sleaziness that isn't in the scope of the laws the DoJ is accusing him of breaking.

Re:Arrested for spimming or extortion?

[Zeinfeld]

Seems that way. But it also seems that since he was arrested for it, he's probably going to publish his spimming methods for everyone else to copycat, just for retaliation. He's not bright, but hopefully people who aren't quite as dumb won't pick up where he left off.

Sounds like a slam dunk extortion case, making good on the threat would substantially increase the sentence. The guy is probably being told by his public defender that making good on his threat could likely add ten years to his sentence.

I don't think that an 18 year old is likely to know anything particularly interesting about sending spam that is not going to become common knowledge soon enough. The problem with these punks is that they always think that they are sooooo smart and its all about them, it isn't.