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.
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.
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