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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
This time microsoft deserves our support. It's time to go with the lesser of two evils :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Richter
Like it or not, he makes more money than most reading slashdot.
I had this warm, fuzzy feeling all day. I now know why!
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
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.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
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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If you hear something, that's my head exploding.
My userid is prime!
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.
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.
Which way will this saga play out? Will it turn out that Spammer Boy is a hydra, and that his demise, like killing of the head of a drug cartel, will spawn a series of replacements who, in true criminal fashion would start killing each other but because they're spammers they'll annoy each other comparing the size of the IMMENSE ORGASMS ORDER TODAY?
Or will he be more like an evil Obi Won, and if you strike him down he will become more powerful than you can ever image thanks to FREE HERBAL VIAGRA JUST $39.99 A PILL?
Or will he suffer the True Death as the sunlight strikes him just as the stake enters his heart while his body collaspes into a pile of dust while he screams out MY NAME IS UBENTO FROM NIGERIA AND DURING THE US INVASION OF IRAQ I WAS GIVEN A MILLION DOLLARS THAT YOU CAN HELP ME EXPORT WITH A LOAN OF ONE MILLION DOLLARS?
Or will this post suffer the lameness filter from Slashdot? Only time will tell.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
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
Yeah, and look at you wanting a free iPod and FreeGamingSystems.
You are a hypocrite.
"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 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
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.
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.
My name is Scott Richter, but you can call me Snotty Scotty. My company has come under attack from an evil empire and I was forced to flee for my life. I have $10 million in assets I wish to hide. If you let me sign over these assets to you I will be forever in your debt. I will glady split half of this sum with you once I have fled to the tropical paradise of Canada.
If you agree please send a registered letter with your name, address, e-mail address, social security number and bank routing number to:
Prisoner #773849
San Quentin Prison
San Quentin, CA 94964
Please hurry, they let me out to the exercise yard soon, and I feel my other assets will soon be raided.
Dear Scott Richter,
My name is Dr Ahmed Abdalla director and board member, Transparency International, Kenya. I got your email address from the web directory so I decided to contact you.
We are interested in diverting some funds currently floating in the suspense account of the federal pay office to your account as soon as possible.
Source of the funds are:
During the Arap Moi's government, government's officials awarded contracts to their own companies, these contracts were grossly over invoiced. Now the present government set up contract review panel to settle those owed outstanding amount. My colleagues and I have identified a huge amount totaling US$870m (Eight hundred and seventy million us dollars) overseas.
We would want US$43.8m (Forty three million Eight Hundred Thousand) dollars out this money oversea transferred to your account because we are not eligible to operate foreign account, and I have been mandated to search for a partner abroad. We really want this transfer made as soon as possible before the government, who have started refunding money from Moi's foreign accounts track this money. We will be offering 20% for your assistance. If you would want to proceed with this transaction please reply with your name and phone number and if you do not accept my offer please treat with utmost confidentiality.
Best Regards,
Dr Ahmed Abdall
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.
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
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!
"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.
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.
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banana charlie sprocket
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
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
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.
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.
Dear Sir,
I am a consultant operating in West Africa named Scott Richter. I am being persued by evil slashdotters who do not like my wonderful products and messages. For this reason I cannot move money in my name through normal banking channels. I think the only way to succeed is to seek help from a foreigner....
Table-ized A.I.