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."

Comments

It's only because MS is suing

[denis-The-menace]

If it was anybody else, he would fight on.

Re:It's only because MS is suing

[rich_r]

sms spam less so, mainly because there is a direct cost associated with it, per message. Those who do sms have to target rather than send as much as possible.

Court Awards Dischargeable In Bankruptcy?

[Maestro4k]

This may be something that varies by state but are damages/etc. awarded from a lawsuit dischargeable under bankruptcy laws? I know my deadbeat dad tried (and failed) to get out of a court settlement over back child support years ago so in that case at least it wasn't allowed.

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.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend?

[Fox_1]

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.

Best part of the whole article:

[hackstraw]

"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?

Re:Random Commentary

[Sheetrock]

The Internet has been an excellent tool for communication and entertainment, but as it grows in popularity measures must be taken to control the impact any one member of the community can have on the whole.

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.)

Re:When you have that much debt

[Tony Hoyle]

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.

Re:Is your email server validating these addresses

[MightyMartian]

Uh, who doesn't have a fucking idea of what he's talking about? Please elaborate on how being a private company has anything to do with constitutional obligations?

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:

This country had a long long tradition of anonymous speach (check out how Ben Franklin and other founding fathers got support for their ideas). Cracking down on spammers is just a politically correct way of cracking down on anonymous speach at large.

It doesn't put any strain on network admins. I have my own mailserver running on a public IP. When "ron.slashdot@[mydomain].com" got spam, I started using "ron.slashdot2@[mydomain].com" -- and I informed everyone I cared about who had used that address about my "real" address (firstname_lastname@mydomain.com). I have been a heavy email user since the 80s; and have many gigabytes of email archived - but never once had a major problem with emails that I didn't submit to a spammer.

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.