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Massachusetts Drops Hammer on Spam Gang
karvind writes "According to story on BBC and Yahoo, the Massachusetts attorney general has filed a lawsuit against one of the world's biggest spam gangs. An emergency court order granted under the suit should see the network of websites the spammers ran shut down.
Attorney General Thomas Reilly's civil complaint against alleged ringleader Leo Kuvayev and six other people associated with 2K Services Ltd. and Ecash Pay Ltd.
Offered for sale on the websites were pornography, pills, pirated software and fake fancy watches."
It's nice to see some spammers getting sued rather than some 12 year old girl who downloads MP3s...
This is nice but as long as there is money to made sending spam there will be plenty of border-line companies jumping into the gap to replace others taken down. This isn't going to end until we go after the companies selling their products through the spammers.
In this day and age, if you open an email from someone you don't know and see links and you click them you are not unwittingly doing anything. You are just a nitwit.
Yep - but if you're 'on the road' or even on a pay per minute dial-up connection then receiving this crap costs you money even if you just initially download the headers.
AT&ROFLMAO
This really isn't going to do anything. Spam sites get shut down all the time and spammers have other servers lined up to move to at a moments notice. They're probably back up and operating at a new site already.
Good Lord, who crapped in your cheerios this morning? A couple notes to your tirade:
1) Counterfeit versions of prescription drugs != drugs from Canada; that should be fairly obvious.
2) Clicking on a link that says it will take you to one thing, then takes you to another is most certainly doing something "unwittingly". Whether or not that person is a nitwit is irrelevant.
3) I would absolutely classify shutting down a spam gangs ring of websites as "bringing the hammer down". They are no longer operational, and are in court. The only thing left to do is to convict them and make them pay monetary damages.
Sheesh, mellow out, you should be happy you might actually start getting less spam.
They're probably back up and operating at a new site already.
Yes, but with this precedent, expect the sites to be shutdown just as fast as warez sites.
Given the area's high retiree population, this doesnt surprise me. After all, they can pick up their V1agra and c1alis practically right around the corner once the email hits their account!
Read more about it at the Sun Sentinel.
Between tracking sex offenders, fighting for Terri Schiavo, and getting slot machines taxed, theres little room for this on the legislative agenda.
...both interiorlly, and exteriorlly.
Since sending spam is so cheap, spamming can be profitable even if a tiny percentage of recipients responds. People have been falling for quack doctors for centuries, and modernization hasn't made us any smarter. As long as the recipients keep paying for getting the spam, it will be around. This leads me to believe that filtering, while it makes many of us happier, will not solve the problem. A sender-pays system is much better. Think what life would be like if credit-card companies could make the USPS and you bear the costs of shipping their offers?
That would be good to know :-) even an estimate of the percentage of people who respond might be sociologically interesting.
For this particular sort of spam, they're selling knock-offs of the products being offered. In that case, the companies whose knocked-off products are being spammed are very much the victims as well and certainly are participants.
There are companies who deal with shady contractors for advertising, and six levels down it ends up in spam, but I don't think that's what we're dealing with here.
Cases like this are a case of smoke and mirrors with a bulk of press coverage. In the end it makes very little difference until we see a drop in the SPAM emails being recieved by our email boxes.
However on the plus side every little bit helps if we do see that little bit that these spammers have removed or potentially removed. Although im sure someone other spammer will probably just grow up and take over the room / bandwidth that the previous spamemrs where taking.
As a Mass. resident, I'm thoroughly amused by the local media outlets... I've heard from both WBZ radio and WCVB TV News the story with a lead in saying something like...
"If you live in Massachusetts, you'll be happy to hear you'll be getting less spam now that..."
I'd be curious to see exactly how much spam from these guys was destined to Massachusetts people. Oh hell, don't bother. Borders are so... 1900's...
Peter
Since this basically is an "organized" crime, what's needed is a RICO investigation. RICO (Racketeer-influenced and Corrupt Organizations act) is a special law crafted to fight organized crime. Essentially anyone knowingly involved in a criminal organization or providing it with support can face a shit load of jail time.
One thing spammers DO need are hosting companies, internet service, a certain amount of banking services, and so on. The people providing them with these services need to be investigated as part of a RICO investigation. That alone will have a chilling effect, and there has to be a few prosecutions possible.
Seeing THOSE guys guy down will do a lot to increase the risk of even doing otherwise "legitimate" business with a spammer, and thus the costs will rise even higher to the point where spam will not be profitable.
Stopping people from spamming is impossible; cutting off their air supply isn't. The money goes someplace, and anyone getting a cut needs to start reviewing the glossy brochures for Federal Penetenieries.
But then don't forget, if you take that idea too far, Spam could be used to attempt to shut out compeditors. Say I'm starting an online book company and hire a spammer to send messages promoting Amazon.com. Now that they've been identified as a link promoted in spam, their url gets blacklisted and poof! You cut off Amazon. That's just cheating.
Impossible. If you run a server, you get spam. You may filter it out before it hits your inbox, but it still travels down the wire to your box. You should care, spam anywhere costs EVERYBODY.
While I do agree that those laws should apply, I wonder about one thing. For false advertising (as an example) are those laws specifically written to only apply to print and tv adds? Or were they written to be universal against any advertisement (I.E. E-mail)? Just making sure that they can legally be applied tothe situation here.
Aside from fraud and false advertising, lets also add in trademark infringement (fake viagra, rolex), mail fraud (fraud+stamp=mail fraud), wire fraud (that one alone is enough to put them away for life), and a few others. Also, I'm pretty sure we could get the internet to qualify as a "wire" under these laws (so they would be aplicable).
So I guess we should write to our lawmakers saying "Don't write new laws, just update the ones already on the books."?
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
And I will state again, anyone who clicks a link in any email that came from some unknown original is a fucking nitwit -- regardless of what it claims to be.
The general public is not as educated on the subject as you are. What about some elderly person who just got a computer as a present so that their grandkids can send email. Are they a nitwit because they click on a link that says cheaper prescriptions?
These spammers are predators and this action is a good thing. Just because you are too 'smart' to be fooled by these people doesn't make everyone else a nitwit. Self-righteous geeks really bother me. Remember, it's because most people aren't computer literate or even want to be that keeps us geeks working.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
I can believe it. There's a lot of very stupid, very naive people in the world who are also very insistent that they're right.
It's hard to argue with these kind of people, mostly because they've developed some kind of reality filter that doesn't let through anything that questions their beliefs. I've always assumed that without the filter, their psyche would collapse under the weight of the truth. You can try to pick away at the filter, but if you suceed they'll only become enraged at your for exposing the truth (and revealing to them their own filter, which they like to ignore).
AccountKiller
Do you think that Joe Average cares if some company advertises through spam? It would be great if he did, but he just doesn't. Consumers care about low prices and low prices. Oh and they also care about low prices. It doesn't matter if the product is made by some 5-year-old kid in a sweatshop and advertised by spamming. Actually, an item like that would propable be quite cheap...
When you see something useful, you tend to be glad about this particular message. Noone likes spam about seminars on accounting and employment laws, but when I got spam about logistics seminar, my sister (who is writing a diploma thesis on this subject) seriously considered attending it.
Computer geeks might have the principles to not buy anything advertised in spam, even if they need the product, but the majority of people are not like this.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
The CBC had an article a little while back about the spammer (Jeremy Jaynes)who was sentenced to nine years in jail. To quote the article:
Prosecutors said Jaynes received 10,000 credit card orders in one month for the [product], each for $39.95 US.
source: http://www.cbc.ca/story/business/national/2005/04/ 08/spam-050408.html