Slashdot Mirror
Spammer Bankrupted by Anti-Spammer Suits
www.sorehands.com writes "The well known spammer Scott ("Snotty Scotty") Richter has filed for bankruptcy protection. In a Denver Post article Richter claims to have less than $10 million in assets but more than $50 million in debts including the $49 million that Microsoft is seeking. Microsoft is not the only lawsuit that Richter is defending, as a law suit filed by anti-spammer Dan Balsam and being handled by anti-spam attorney Timothy Walton is still pending. Hopefully, Microsoft will have the automatic stay from the bankruptcy court dissolved so that they can stop Richter from spamming and gather more evidence."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Richter
Like it or not, he makes more money than most reading slashdot.
Hopefully, Microsoft will have the automatic stay from the bankruptcy court dissolved so that they can stop Richter from spamming and gather more evidence.
I can't imagine how MS would accomplish this. Their suit doesn't concern claims that are non-dischargeable, and as a bankrupt, Richter is ADMITTING their claim for damages, so it is dischargeable.
Why the court would permit them to proceed (I'm looking for a legal reason, not wishful thinking) despite the stay, I cannot imagine, but I doubt there are any grounds. Bankruptcy is no fun, of course, so while I imagine that MS can engage in some legal skirmishing, the suit is pretty much over, but Richter will be in bankruptcy, so...
With regards to any injunction, that would have to be resolved before the bankruptcy court. Bankruptcy discharges the debt, not the injunction.
Contact us via e-mail: info@optinbig.com
or phone: (303) 464-8164
OptInRealBig.com, LLC
1333 W 120th Ave Suite 101
Westminster, CO 80234
here's the link, for all you lazy clickers
Scotty2Hottie.
If he's making so much money, why is he filing for bankruptcy? He's only got 25 employees and a monster bandwidth bill, but I still can't see him spending $15M a year (what he claims to make) on operating costs. A few mil for the bandwidth, some salaries, and a lease (plus other small costs). This guy is slick.
If he files for bankruptcy, the government pays his debts, etc..., what's to stop him from doing it again? and again? and again? You get the point. As long as he's free, he's going to be doing this. The only way to stop it is to put him in jail.
... someone determined to not pay you is still rather hard to punish.
If it's any comfort, you're not entitled to bankruptcy protections for losses incurred due to your own criminal and/or actionable activity, such as fraud. Even if all his spamming was legal, there's documented instances of him lying to his own customers. Not that his customers deserve a dime either, but they could very well seize all his assets and garnish future earnings.
Of course even if they get a judgement, they still have to collect
I don't know where you got the impression that the government pays your debts in bankruptcy protection. Creditors are the ones that are just SOL, and they have insurance for this sort of thing. Yes, it spreads it out to society as a whole, but it ain't Uncle Sam picking up the tab.
Granted it's not like they can get much from him if he's legitimately broke, but I don't believe he can stop MS & others from collecting what the court awarded. The bankruptcy court will dispose of his assets and decide who gets what portions, but what's left he'll still owe once he's out of bankruptcy protection.
Back child support isn't dischargeable in bankruptcy because it is a non-dischargeable debt. There aren't many of those. Curiously, the only debts that aren't presently dischargeable in bankruptcy are fines imposed for crimes, child support awards and...guess what...student loans. You can thank the GOP for the latter in 1995. That's right. Punitive damages awarded for mass torts are dischargeable in Chapter 11 for the big boys, but if Billy or Sally can't repay their student loans, tough titty. Now they want to do the same with other kinds of consumer debt. Bastards.
This looks like a liquidation (Chapter 7) not a debt restructuring (Chapter 13) so yeah, while a lot of his assets are going to go bye-bye, he won't owe bupkiss after the discharge order goes through. That's what bankruptcy is for. Your credit smells to high heaven for 7 years and for those 7 years further protection isn't available, but anything discharged is wiped clean.
I'm seeing some pretty mean-spirited comments on bankruptcy on this board. I assume these people work for credit-card companies. Sorry, but weaking bankruptcy protections to get one spammer is a pretty bad trade-off. He's bankrupt. That should be enough.
AOL are also well known to chase spammers into the ground, and now that the spammers know that big companies are onto them, they are changing their ways and using different methods
SPIM (im spam), exploiting google via cloaking, SMS spam and phishing are some of the ways the current spammers are 'diversifying'
Business Voyeur
Government does NOT pay his debts. Depending on which chapeter he files under (I didn't RTFA) either most of his assets will be liquidated, and his creditors get some of what they are owed, or he gets a court-ordered payment plan in exchange for no collection activity as long as he fulfils that plan.
I'm going to be blunt, and if I'm modded down, so be it.
You, good sir, don't have the vaguest fucking idea what you're talking about.
As we speak, I'm looking at my two mail gateway servers getting hit with distributed dictionary attacks in the neighborhood of several hundred per minute per server. These are delightful little attacks, using common addresses like magic@ and love@, as well as variants like rescue911@. These attacks, coming from zombies all over the Internet, actually were shutting down on our mail server until we put it behind two Postfix boxes that fend off the worst of it.
Since we are a private company, we are not Constitutionally obliged to deliver this crap, or even to let anything past our system. Beyond that, well over 90% of our customers have request that they not see spam at all.
The REAL solution to spam is to first have fuzzy-thinkers like yourself actually understand where this shit is coming from, the strain that it puts on networks and on network admins before it ever hits your fucking mailbox.
Have a lovely day, and enjoy your intense and overwhelming ignorance.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
No, it's because the bankruptcy laws are about to change next month. If he had waited, he might actually have to pay something.
So what then? We shouldn't choose? We shoud just sit on our hands and wait for an asteroid to hit us? That's a very pretty string of words, but it has absolutely no practical worth here.
It doesn't put any strain on network admins.
Did you even read his message at all?
I got a call last night that our mail server was really slow. Logged in to see that the load average is skyrocketing from spamd, and there are several thousand undelievered messages building up in the queue. We were in the process of getting a dictionary on a couple of domains, and spamassasin couldn't scan them as fast as they were coming in. I think last night it was about 400,000 messages.
Over the past few months, this has become more and more common, and now we're looking at putting another system in front of that for the sole purpose of scanning email. This costs us time figuring out how to deal with it (and dealing with it on a temporary basis to keep the server up), in the hardware we're going to have to buy, money to be spent to colocate another system, bandwidth costs, and the time to set it all up, and keep it running in the future.
How exactly do you figure there's no strain on the network admins?
Speak before you think
Google is your friend ;) Well was before they went public ;)
Dictionary attacks are where spammers try entire dictionaries of names against a domain.
Typically one of say 10,000 compromised windows boxes connects to your email server as says "is there an aardvark@example.com?", then it say "aaron@aardvark.com?", then another one connects and say "barry@example.com?", and so on down to aardvarrk.aardvark@ through to zulu.zulu@example.com.
Typically you see one connection from each PC involved in the attack, so blacklisting is almost pointless (it might help stop the next attack), and because you can't be 100% sure it wasn't just a typo....
I think you see more dictionary attacks the more email addresses that are out there. We have a server which has over the years had over a million email accounts in one domain (some repetition of names), so there are a lot of references to the domain out there, it seems almost continual attacks of this nature. It perpetually has 80 or so connections sending and receiving email to the outside world, even though it forwards email for only 20 or 30,000 mostly low use email accounts.
Sometimes I see attacks that look like dictionary attacks, but on inspection the bastards have actually already harvested many thousands of addresses in your domain, and are delivering spam to working addresses only, in alphabetical order, in a similar pattern.
Still you know when you see machines connect, and try five or so addresses in close alphabetical succession that your email server is in for a bad few hours.
I suspect blacklists are about the only useful weapon here, but even they are only so successful.
Either ways admins have had to do a lot of work to get email servers into shape, and cope with the sheer dross.
Whilst costwise the eyeball cost to end users is probably the biggest waste, for moderate to big email admins spam is a perpetual waste of life.
A lot of us remember the Internet before spam, heck before the web, when you could relay email through almost anyones server because the one you needed was offline. When the right thing to do was to be strict about what you sent out, but relaxed about what you accepted in terms of email format.
The essential idea is that if you throw enough shit at the wall, some is bound to stick. Using such lists of thousands of email addresses, you're bound to get the odd one, like "rickc@whatever.com" that's going to be legitimate. The key problem here is that it even SMTP sessions that end with "554 fuck off you spamming prick" take up bandwidth on the network and resources on the server. Imagine over a million of these hitting a mail server a day, with peaks that see hundreds of thousands come through over a 90 minute period. The server becomes sluggish and unresponsive, the queue grows as the server is no longer able to adequately handle incoming and outgoing requests, and eventually the answerer daemon itself is brought down, and no one can talk to the server for several minutes at a shot.
Basically, it's a DDoS, though I don't think the guys pulling the zombies' strings think of it like that. They are just trying to maximize the possibility of getting a message delivered to a legit address. The fact that they're fucking with a mail service is secondary.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Beyond that, the point of this entire thread is that whether or not you publish your email address is besides the point. Whether you never receive spam or not, it's almost certain that your mail server is getting bombarded with these distributed dictionary attacks coming from zombies. If you happen to have an address like rclark@whatever.com, then I can assure you that the only reason you are not seeing spam is because either your ISP or your own mail software is spotting the spam. These sorts of attacks are used because even if, out of millions of address variants, you only manage to get a thousand through to valid addresses, who cares? The zombies aren't on your network, and the odds of you being caught using the zombies is pretty damn low.
I'm trying to point out that spam has a very real cost not just for the poor end-user who has to wade through fifty pr0n and v1agra messages, but that his frustration and bandwidth pain is only a fraction of that of the ISP who has to deal with the 99% that the end-user isn't seeing.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I am an attorney, but this is not legal advise. If you need that, get it from an attorney licensed in your jurisdiction.
Nearly everything this AC wrote is just plain nonsense.
Curiously, the only debts that aren't presently dischargeable in bankruptcy are fines imposed for crimes, child support awards and...guess what...student loans
No. Those aren't the only ones. Certain taxes (time dependent), fraud, luxury goods or large borrowing within 60 days of filing (presumptively), omitted debts, willfully injury, fiduciary violations, death from dui, and a few others. (see 11 USC 523).
Spam probably falls into the "willful injury" category.
You can thank the GOP for the latter in 1995.
No, you made that up, too. They may have been tightened over abuses at that point, but they weren't generally dischargeable until several years after payment was first due. *That* happened due to the MDs leaving med school and filing.
Punitive damages awarded for mass torts are dischargeable in Chapter 11 for the big boys,
No, that's not true, either. Those are nondischargeable. While it would be *possible* to do a Chapter 11 that left those unpaid, it would *require* that the creditors, including the victims, receive at least as much as they would in a liquidation, and would result in the owners/shareholders losing their *entire* stake in the business.
So aside from having the law and facts entirely wrong, I suppose you may have a point.
hawk, esq.
I had an article published at http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/free_issues/is sue_02/focus_spam_postfix that might help you with the setup part.
I used a cast-off Pentium 233 box running FreeBSD and Postfix to build a frontline spam filter to protect my company's Exchange server. Then, we published MX records pointing to the Exchange server with the FreeBSD server as a secondary MX, and then blocked incoming port 25 connections to the Exchange server. In case of emergency, we can simply unblock that port and resume sending an unfiltered feed to the main server.
Good luck!
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
What? How is this insightful?
/.ers are so biased against Microsoft as to blame everything on them.
Windows security has nothing to do with spam. That's just stupid.
I much rather hope I've fallen for a troll than to believe
Slashdot: News for nerds. Stuff tha-- MICRO$OFT IS THE DEVIL!!1
This means that as long as they're in Chapter 11, they'll be continuing to spam, and they'll probably be continuing to pay Scotty a salary (unless they fire him, which is unlikely.) This isn't Scotty personally going bankrupt, it's just his corporation. It might or might not emerge from bankruptcy, but if it doesn't, you're probably right that he'll come up with some new sleazy business rather than doing something legitimate.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Again this argument comes up, and there's still no evidence to support it. IIS has a smaller installed base than Apache, yet it is still targeted more often.
Whether it's because MS products are designed to be used/administered by idiots or because the products themselves suck, both are possibilities, but the "larger install base" argument still doesn't hold water.