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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."
This time microsoft deserves our support. It's time to go with the lesser of two evils :)
If this holds it may begin to show that the profits from spamming are just too risky, and others may not wish to try it. On the other hand, bankruptcy is often just a shield to protect assets. Maybe with a combination of civil and criminal action we will one day see a reduction in spam.
My
But the commercials you see are paid for by the advertiser. Every person paying for internet access is paying for spam, so if anyone is a socialist, it's the spammer for making sure everyone pays for his ability to send spam.
The general difference between commercials on free tv and spam online is that spam online does not go to pay for the programming or content you are seeing.
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Even when lawsuits are successfull, they just go bankrupt. Some may even be intelligent enough to hide some money for later...
As long as stupid people buy their stupid crap, theyll continue. Lawsuits or not.
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That's a retarded argument.
Once you start getting free internet service for putting up with spam, come see me.
That's not even mentioning the tons of other issues surrounding the shady tactics used by spammers. Sender address spoofing, compromising MTAs so they can use them to spam, sending porn advertisements to childrens email addresses just to name a few.
Legitimate business you say? Where?
The spam I don't have an issue with is from websites I actually use or have bought products from, that use real addresses that I can opt out of when I no longer wish to see their specials.
See, this is kind of stupid. We shouldn't be suing for money, we should be puttin this guy in JAIL!
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.
I have this really funny quote that I like to put here. Unfortunately, there's this really annoying thing called a char
I hate when companies make people bancrupt with lawsiuts. I really love to see MS make that poor shmuck bancrupt. Yes, I'm a hypocrite.
Yeah, and look at you wanting a free iPod and FreeGamingSystems.
You are a hypocrite.
I know many here will be cheering, after all it's an evil spammer, but does this strike anyone else as being scary? Yes he's broken laws and done bad things, we suppose, but does he really deserve to owe $49 million? And how much of that is from legal costs rather than straight fines? If he did wrong and has been convicted he deserves to be punished, but the legal system as it stands can bankrupt an innocent all too easily.
I am trolling
So do the people who head organized crime.
Although it's tempting to cheer as Mr Richter is beaten down by the weight of Microsoft's legal muscle, I have severe misgivings about this.
First, corporations should not be attempting to lay down the law. The legality or not of spamming is for the State to decide, and there should be criminal prosecution of those who break the law.
When corporations can turn the law to their advantage, they will inevitably attack the real threats to their business - competitors.
Second, criminalising spam (or bankrupting spammers through civil suits) will only drive spammers to work outside the reach of the US courts. While US spammers can reasonably be expected to evolve over time to collaborate with their host society, foreign spammers don't have any incentive to (e.g.) refuse to promote child snuff porn.
Lastly, spam is a problem that will, eventually, go away by itself. Yes, I actually think this. There will come a time when people say, "of course you could send a million unwanted emails, but who would be so stupid?"
Spam is unsolvable by technical means, and it's unsolvable by legal suits, civil or criminal. It will disappear when the Internet has matured to the point where business is more than a one-shot affair, and tit-for-tat becomes the rule, not the exception.
So when the school bully picks on someone you don't like, don't cheer. Next time it'll be you.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
I agree with the other reply to your comment: please stop putting in that "Want a free iPod?" advert in your posts. It is distracting and I believe most slashdot readers do not appreciate it.
Let's say that I run a personal mail server on my headless Linux box in the closet, which handles my personal mail, mail for my small home based business, and a few accounts for friends.
With scum like Mr. Richter and his ilk running around spamming people, my mail server incurs an additional load, in the form of increased bandwidth of useless messages pouring into it, which require me to upgrade my hardware and/or storage space to cope with it and still maintain some reasonable modicum of speed and reliability.
The spam also causes me to expend time and energy fighting it, setting up filtering software, tweaking it, etc.
Who pays for these upgrades that the spam forces me to have to put in place? Not the spammers. Me and my wallet.
If there were no spam, I could run the system on some old 386 I have in the basement, and not have to worry that it'll drown in an unwanted assault of traffic that has nothing to do with, and no value for, my customers, my business, my friends, or me.
Now, if the above illustration was for a small time mail server, imagine how much bigger the costs are to an ISP, or an upstream backbone provider. MUCH higher. And you wonder why people are fighting spam?
Spam costs little (or in most cases, nothing) for the spammer to send, but it costs people money to deal with it.
Your fake sig is spam for a pyramid scheme . so i dont think you should be one to be commenting on greed or spam really.
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
The problem being that a lot of the spam on the internet is due to their bad program design and poor coding. So you're picking one side of the same evil, MS suing doesn't help the problem, them fixing their exploitable machines so they stop turning into spam relays is a starting point. Then fixing their applications would be a nice next move. It does amuse me that HTML email, which MS basically MADE popular ... is now being ... toned down. As in, Outlook2k3 not loading images by default. Perhaps if they had thought a little more about this a few years ago, rather than attempting to wipe out netscape then we wouldn't be in the situation we are in now.
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the banks help you out, especially since everything you sank into your retirement plans, Social Security, and your house are NOT going to be taken away.
So, it's not really that bad, he still made out like a bandit.
Sigh.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Microsoft officials called the filing a victory. "Microsoft and the state of New York said we would drive him into bankruptcy, and together we have," said Aaron Kornblum, Microsoft's Internet safety enforcement attorney. "The kind of spam Mr. Richter was sending was not only annoying, it was illegal, and the law sets out penalties for this kind of illegal activity."
It sounds like Microsoft took the law into its own hands. They saw that the government couldn't/wouldn't do anything about him, so MS blasted him with lawsuits until he succumbed.
Isn't this the kind of justice most of us Slashdotters don't like? After all, many of us have complained about the RIAA suing someone, and that person has to settle out of court because they can't afford to fight. Isn't this the same thing?
My userid is prime!
"Junk mail keeps mail prices low for the average joe since the infrastructure is held together by all the money spent on junk mail."
And destroys thousands of acres of eco-system, and produces millions of tons of trash, and wastes thousands of gallons of petrochemicals... Yeah, Junk Mail is just peachy...
On average I get 5 times as much Snail Spam as e-spam and it's about 10 times as much of a pain in the ass to deal w/ being that I have to bag it all up and haul it to the recycling center rather than just (at most) select all marked as spam and click/press delete.
I think I'd rather pay $1.50 to mail a postcard than continue to waste time/resources/ozone to get a continual stream of coupons, mortgage refi offers, etc. that I will never use.
Why should somebody have the right to run up credit card debt and get a way out later on?
Because, as it turns out, most credit card debt related bankruptices are not due to Joe Q Public buying a $10,000 plasma TV and stuff and then just filing. It turns out half are due to life-threatening medical expenses (cancer, coronary, etc). The new legislation just creates a sort of indentured servitude to the medical industry. They can charge whatever they want (you do want to live right?) and then even if you declare bankruptcy you cant escape.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
"It's the legal fees that are battering the company," said OptInRealBig.com lawyer Steven Richter
Spammer or no, I don't like the principle that if you run out of money to defend yourself, you lose.
Nah, that just means he spends more than you.
It's easy enough to acquire $10 million dollars by spending $50 million on it, but, call me old fashioned, I insist on thinking of "make" as having something to do with net profits.
A bum panhandling on the street makes more than Scott, and is in a more honorable profession to boot.
KFG
Like it or not, he makes more money than most reading slashdot.
My observation is that people who are not particularily intelligent, are good at lying through their teeth to appear friendly, and have no morals, make lots of money.
And they all seem to be in Sales.
First, the "socialist" mindset usually applies to social services and policies, not technology uses. Second, you specifically state this is a LEGITIMATE business route. That is the main controversy - is it legitimate? If I siphoned gasoline out of your car in your driveway at night, it would obviously be theft. If I steal your internet bandwidth through the use of spyware/malware/viruses to send my Legitimate business email, is it the same? I think the primary issues are the methods which the spammers use. If they only sent messages from their own servers through bandwidth they paid for, it would be exactly the same as snail-mail junkmail. I've read some estimates that 90% of all spam is sent through such illegal means (I have no ability to confirm such estimates). If this is true, we can differentiate between legal and illegal spam. Then, and only then can we discuss the merits of the "legitimate" advertising email business model.
He makes money from doing something illegal. Drug dealers probably make more money than me, too, but that's not a good thing.
Plus, as pointed out, at least I'm pretty sure that my money-making method (i.e. working at a so-called legitimate job) will sustain me through the rest of my life. His money-making method will get him sued into bankrupcy (case in point) and perhaps even thrown in jail.
Yeah, I like my way better, too.
So... Microsoft is the good guy in this one?
In all seriousness, life isn't as black and white as Slashdotters or George Fucking Bush seem to think. A company can't be "evil" and more than a country can be "evil". "Good guys" and "bad guys" are vehicles to simplify movies and books, and the bible for the simple minded.
I don't respond to AC's.
He will survive. After he emerges from bankruptcy he will start a new company that delivers spam or does something similar. It's in his blood and I can't see the guy doing something else for a living.
http://www.busyweather.com/
If a person has no ability to pay their debts, and no forseeable point in time at which their circumstances could change to be able to repay the debt, holding the debt over their head for the rest of their lives is not at all far removed from slavery practices, however more civilized it might appear to be.
It is unconscionable to hold any person to remain in debt for an unjustifiably long period of time with respect to the size of the original debt, and there should come a point at which such debts must simply be forgiven.
Existing bankruptcy laws strike a balance between what is fundamentally humane to the debtor, while still carrying a serious enough burden for them that it is not something a person would enter lightly.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Even in that case, a company could just shitcan all the spam, since they're not the US Government and can ignore the first amendment all they want.
I wouldn't say they can ignore the first amendment, but blocking spam fits in to the fact that while the first amendment lets you talk all you want, no one is forced to listen.
Spamming an email server is the equivalent of calling the company's secretary and demanding she take down messages for thousands of random people, and if you happen to mention the name of someone who works there, she has to give them the message.
That dog won't hunt, Monsignor.
$8.95/mo web hosting
First they censored the spammers, but I was not a spammer so I did not stand up.
Stopping spammers isn't about censorship.
Consider:
- You start yelling at me.
- I tell you to stop,
- You yell louder,
- I plug my ears
- You get a megaphone
- I lock myself inside my house
- You get a full sized sound system
- I brick up the windows
- You get a stadium -rated sound system
- You blow out the neighbour's windows with the sound system
- You get arrested for destruction of property
- You claim first-ammendment rights.
- You get laughted out of court
This is essentially an analogy of the spamming industry.It doesn't matter what you're saying. Content is irrelevant -- even the fact that communication is (supposedly) occuring (( given that the target recipient does not want to hear you, the existence of communication is questionable )). When it gets annoying, destructive and even expensive for the people who have to deal with your actions, it's just illegal.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
We don't have to give up hating Microsoft to cheer them on in this case. This is no different than cheering on "Uncle Joe" Stalin when he was the enemy of our enemy -- Hitler. That's why I think much of the discussion about whether Google will turn into an evil company is beside the point -- it doesn't really matter so long as they're an evil company that counterbalances Microsoft.
I don't really have a problem with people giving up their personal info and buying crap they don't need in the hopes of getting a free whatever.
What annoys me is the referral system, which means that people keep needing to get more people to sign up (to support the bottom of the pyrmid). People have trouble finding 5 people or whatver who haven't signed up, so they start spamming message boards, putting in their sigs, ect. Pretty soon they start posting just so their sig gets posted, and message board quality goes down. This is more annoying on sites that don't have moderation like Slashdot.
My signiture was created in response to this.
I have blog like everyone else
When I get tired of commercials, I turn off the TV. Guess what? they just go to the great big /dev/null of the cable tv world. However, I am NOT in a position to turn off my mail server. And sadly, it costs considerable time and money to send spam to /dev/null.
> companies are not congress, and they cannot make law.
Well, the first part is right... The second used to be.