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."
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.
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.
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
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.
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
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.
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
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!
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.
No, it's because the bankruptcy laws are about to change next month. If he had waited, he might actually have to pay something.
Are you in debt?!?
GE_T OU*T OF DEB?T FAST
with our fool.proof pla-n
banana charlie sprocket
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
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.