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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."
If it was anybody else, he would fight on.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
to keep him from declaring bankruptcy.
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.
IANAL so if I'm mistaken someone please correct me, I'd like to know.
I've worked with parts of Microsoft before and strangely enough this article reinforces what I saw, they aren't all bad - oh I know they are the evil empire and everything - but you can't get that much money and geekness together without some good happening. Besides when it comes down to evilness I'll take the big MS over millions of dirty little spammers everyday, at least their damage to my computer is more bad program design then malicious malware.
The rock, the vulture, and the chain
"It's the legal fees that are battering the company," said OptInRealBig.com lawyer Steven Richter, father of Scott Richter. He said the company faces lawsuits from Microsoft and other parties in Colorado, California and Utah. "OptIn is profitable but for these lawsuits."
Wow, the kettle doesn't fall far from the black pot tree now does it?
As the whole has been pounded pretty heavily, it becomes apparent protections need to be in place on what used to be open bandwidth. Much as with radio, restrictions on use actually create more opportunities than are eliminated -- stopping P2P would mean broad new choices in applications, games and media, stopping hackers would mean better online shopping, and stopping spam would ironically make communication easier and more popular.
Soon we will be using smart cards to get online and perform transactions. It looks like they'll be in our computers now via DRM but maybe that'll help us find a meaningful solution (spam or pirate and your $400 motherboard becomes useless for getting on the Internet.)
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
? i pay for my email server . ,the spammers dont pay me so down to0ples that logic . . ,its an abusive trade tactic vs our rights argument.
yet i get spam
I also pay for my internet conection, I dont mind ads on websites if the ads are non intrusive(i dont install shockwave on my reqular browser and use adblock for the worst offenders)
This is not a Left wing vs wing argument
However i dont like the fact that a lawsuit alone can bankrupt people , this is open for abuse .
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
...this guy, bankrupt as he claims to be, has more than I will ever make many times over.
Crouching lawsuit, hidden assets
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
With IPv6, however, it's really easy to block all mail coming from any specific country.
I dunno about you, but I'd feel less bothered about blocking all mail from Uzbekistan than from the USA. And if the ISPs in the country have a problem with it, they can lobby their government to criminalize spam, too. Personally, I'd rather operate universal blacklisting with explicit whitelisting, but there's just too many ISP's in the USA, with new ones popping up daily, for that to work.
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.
I'm far more pessimistic about it than you. Personally, I think that spam will continue to grow as long as the spammers think they can get away with it. There have *always* been get-rich-quick schemes, and there *always* will be as long as there's enough people gullible enough to get sucked in. Sometimes, a one-shot business is all you need to be set for life.
The only way to stamp it out is to go on the aggressive. I personally receive about 3,200 spams a week. This is increasing, not decreasing. It is costing me money, because I have to pay for my bandwidth usage. I am not going to just sit around and wait until they grow out of it, because that isn't going to happen in my lifetime. Sorry if it doesn't jive with your rosy view of the world, but I'm doing everything in my power to fight the spammers, and I'm not going to stop until the bastards leave me alone. Criminalizing it in the USA will take an enormous chunk out of the amount of work I need to do to fight it, and I, for one, would welcome that.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
It's not that simple. I work for a bankruptcy Trustee. With a case this high profile, they'll put a good trustee in charge, and he won't get away with as much as you'd think.
I don't know Colorado bankruptcy law all that well, as we're in Florida, but I know that Florida is one of the more "friendly" places to file bankruptcy, and it's not that easy to hide assets if the right firm is on the case.
I prefer the laws we have here. It doesn't matter what you do with your money.. the state can take all of it and sell your assets to the highest bidder to recover it (the principle being money gained illegaly does not belong to you). They also have the right to empty bank accounts, retirement plans, etc. and for the big cases can sqeeze the offshore accounts too (easy against some countries, less so against others).
They use it a lot against drug dealers etc. using that against spammers (who are also gaining money by in an illegal manner) would be really nice.
Unfortunately Richter is in the US where all he has to do is claim he's compliant with the (I) CAN-SPAM (AS-MUCH-AS-I-LIKE) act and he's home free.
This is what I was referring to. If this isn't referring to the Constitution, then I'd love to hear why you think commercial mail services ought to deliver every bit of zombie-generated fraudulent advertising to the end-user:
Wow, you are really quite clueless. I'm guessing by your comment that you don't actually know anything at all about administrating large mail systems, and are just some goofy little hobbiest without a very small presence on the Internet.
We administer over a thousand email addresses for over a hundred domains. We are hit every day with a minimum of 900,000 distributed dictionary attacks, where common addresses like jsmith@ and magic@ are nailed from thousands of zombies all over the world. Now, 99% of these will get rejected out of hand because we don't actually have a jsmith@ or magic@, but each connection is a drag on the resources of the server, and if you get enough of them in a row, they can become a DoS attack.
Our mail server was being brought to its knees by these attacks. There were periods when it would cease to respond on port 25 for up to fifteen minutes at a time, not only blocking incoming mail, but preventing our customers from sending it out. They got all sorts of charming timeout messages, and we lost a few customers who went to other services (read: spam cost us $$$). What's more, because we are billed on the 95th percentile, these attacks were topping out our bandwidth limit and we were paying several hundred dollars a month for about three months (read: spam cost us big $$$).
I finally got smart, installed Linux and Postfix on one of our old boxes and made that server our MX record, and essentially hid the main mail server. Last month I put a second Postfix box online to handle the traffic. The Linux boxes filter out something like 97% of all the incoming mail attempts, almost all of which are either virus-infected or zombie-generated spam messages. As I said, each joe job or distributed dictioanary attack takes up an enormous amount of resources. Here's a sample of the addresses being puked at us for each domain:
homogeneization5@,brannigan@,ckwt111@,tacheometer9 11@,sunspot1111@,
tzi-dar111@,boogey911@,fitzsimmon111@,
skewering911@,ldiscs5@,tztl911@,lacemaker111@,
tzub5@,tunr111@
This is just a sampling from the last 60 or 70 seconds of one of my Postfix boxes, and this is a pretty light load. Now, hopefully, you may at least have some vague understanding of the kind of crap that's being puked at mail servers.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Who do you trust to legislate proper behavior on the internet?
The same institutions I trust to legislate proper behaviour everywhere else. True, my trust in the current crop of legislators is pretty low. But still higher than my trust in large corporations.
Spam solvable? OK, solve it. Whatever technique you develop, people will find a way around it. Forever. If you can eliminate spam as it exists today, new varieties will appear that bypass whatever guards you place. Look at the "win an ipod" signatures - this is spam.
I do not like watching Microsoft (or any wealthy entity) using the courts as a weapon. Period.
Lastly, spam will disappear anyhow. Not soon, but eventually. I'd explain why but the margin is too small to hold my notes...
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
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.
$50 million - $49 million = $1 million debt. Doesn't that mean that pending the MS lawsuit, he still has a wad totalling up to $9 million?
Seems far from "bankrupt" to me...
I have always contended that the notion that spammers make tons of money is overblown hype. The fact that this company's attorney is the father of the owner is a classic example. If they were really making money they wouldn't be hiring the CEO's dad to do this stuff. And if the CEO's dad is milking the company into bankruptcy, then there is some kind of poetic justice and consistency in the family that almost brings a tear to my eye.
I agree - consider what MS's actual motivation here is: Someone is exploiting their broken security model to send spam. They're after the spammer not because they care about internet users' annoyances, but because they don't like how the preponderance of spam helps people realize how bad their product is.
It's just like the DMCA-enabled tactic of nailing anyone who can prove by example that you're lying about how good your security is.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Greylisting is a popular method, though we had problems with our customers not being understanding about the odd message of theirs getting held up. When you're talking about tens of thousands of zombies, tarpitting and block-lists can become itself a huge resource hog. We tried a number of solutions, and basically just set up some Postfix boxes. It's a testament to Linux's TCP/IP implementation that a Pentium Classic-MMX 233mhz with 128mb of RAM and a Pentium II 266mhz with 128mb RAM can withstand the onslaughts. Mind you, they don't do anything else other than stop the bad crap and pass the rest on to our actual mail server.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Intimidation is not the way to get rid of spam. Fixing broken Windows security is. Microsoft is just taking the option that's easier for them to implement.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
5 times as much snail and email spam - well before filtering I get about 3 to 4 thousand junk emails a day of various sorts, and I've met people with far more. Trust me you don't know what email spam is about if you get more snail mail spam.
In the UK you can opt out of snail spam - works pretty well - I'm tempted to sign-up everyone in the village (as the validation is pretty weak) to save the postman work, and save the planet.
Problem is I fear the post office offer bulk discounts - perhaps if you campaign to stop the bulk discounts...
You can thank big government for that. If it weren't for our ridiculously complex, ambiguous, and highly exploitable legal system, people would have a much better chance of sucessfully representing themselves. (Think about that. What should one think of a system of law which can't even be understood by the individuals subject to its rule?)
You took his stuff. You pound him.
In fact, the spam makes the material you are viewing more expensive, by increasing everybody's bandwidth costs.
If you knew the vulnerability that was being discussed, then why did you attack the strawman of e-mail reception being the vulnerability
Because I was anticipating that someone, like you, would fall for the poster's own straw man, which is the relaying issue. So I wasn't putting up a straw man, I was eliminating one from the discussoin. Yes, 0wned boxes are part of the problem, but it is more a symptom of the problem. The real problem is the viability of spam as a faux-business model, and that causes the scammers to seek out fraudulant/anonymous ways to relay their mail, regardless of what platform it's on, and regardless of whether it was an OS hole, a social hack, or a poor implementation that allows the illegal activity when they don't have their own un-blacklisted box to send from.
The thread's about the spammer himself and his activity, and about getting punished for doing what he was doing. Plenty more where that came from, and the incentive for cracking people's machines is impacted. If every PC in the US was impervious to relay attempts, we'd still be getting choked with spam from Asia and Eastern Europe, sent by machines specifically set up to do that. Suits and prosecutions overseas are going to take a lot longer to have an impact, but that has to happen, too. Even that, though, is still treating the symptom. The fix is in getting more people to understand the fraudulant nature of so much of that spam, and to simply take the incentive out of sending it.
The poster's complaint about "intimidation" not being a useful tactic is simply wrong. Wrong because that's not what the suit and its consequences were. The spammer wasn't being intimidated out of legitimate or MS-competitive business, he was engaged in abusive, fraudulant activities, knew he was, and was simply gambling that he wouldn't get caught or called on it. So, someone with deep pockets and a lot of upset mailbox users stepped up. If the top 25 people like the spammer in question were similarly shut down, enourmous amounts of spam would disappear from the scene. And just as important, the prevailing sense that these guys are immune from some retribution for what they do would be altered.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.