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MS Gets $7 Million From Spammer
pin_gween writes "Reuters UK reports that Microsoft has settled its spam suit against Scott Richter for $7 million. From the article: 'Microsoft and New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer had sued Richter in late 2003, asserting that he had sent, or helped other spammers send, billions of e-mail messages to consumers touting everything from herbal products to loan consolidation schemes.'"
Richter knows nobody in their right mind would agree to receiving the loads of $hit he shovels. What he effectively saying is, "I'm going to hide in teeny-tiny font, at the bottom of some website, when you click "Accept" for your order (whatever that may be) you're also agreeing to receive my spam."
In his case he's a product of what he solicits - Garbage.
"Simplify, simplify, simplify!" Thoreau
and send some people to jail AND take their money
simply taking their money isn't good enough as they can afford it so it becomes a cost of doing business
untill they slam them in jail nothing will change
Great, where's my cut?
As entrepreneurs go, Richter is scummy and opportunistic, but spammers come a lot worse. Richter at least made an attempt to operate openly and within a feasible interpretation of the law, instead of setting up shop in China and exploiting zombie networks distribute his spam.
From a legal standpoint, this is a nice victory for Microsoft. I hope they achieve their deterrent effect by making the financial incentives to spam more dubious. I'm afraid, though, that they will only succeed in driving hardcore spammers deeper underground, with Richter serving as an example of the dangers of treating your spam operation like a legitimate business.
domain combinatorics
Shouldn't 'we' as the true victims get some of that?
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
Everyone gets spammed and somehow Microsoft gets $7M. How does that work?
If he was willing to settle for $7 million that means that he's made at least that much, and probably significantly more, spamming :P:P
Note that the settlement doesn't prevent richter from spamming.
From TFA:
Nevertheless, Richter said that he and his company had changed their e-mailing practices and pledged not to send spam to anyone who has not asked to be sent commercial e-mail.
So supposedly, from now on he will only be mailing to users who have "opted in". Hmm.. sounds familiar.
asserting that he had sent, or helped other spammers send, billions of e-mail messages to consumers
At first I was wondering why Microsoft gets the money, and whether they would keep it. What's the basis for this suit? It's not a class action, is it? Shouldn't the money be going to those consumers that were affected by it?
Granted the article mentions
Smith said that Microsoft will reinvest all of the money, after legal expenses, including $5 million that will go to increase Internet enforcement efforts and expand technical and investigative support to help law enforcers to address computer-related crimes.
But what does that really mean?
He then added, "We do this by certifying all zombie machines through the Microsoft Genuine Advantage program. Only licensed copies of Windows will be used to send spam."
Microsoft's odds of actually seeing the money are about as likely as a spammer "unsubscribing" you.
I wonder if email is going the way of usenet. I used to use usenet all the time but gave up when spam destroyed its usefulness for me. Every member of my family has switched to Google Mail because our ISP mail accounts, even with the different services' spam protections and Thunderbird's filtering capabilities suffer from too much spam. It seems as though these lawsuits, which make for a great public relations thing (even I'm proud of MS for doing this), aren't going to make any real diffence.
How does Google filter spam so well or is it just that the service is new?
I still like the idea of publishing spammers home addresses and then sending credit card applications, catalogs and all the rest to their homes. If we could get each of them to receive a couple bushels of junk mail every day at their homes, maybe that would help. I'm against the idea of handing pornography to their children as they play on the playground, but it does seem poetically just.
What can be done to save email or as Google already done it?
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
I too could get $7 million from a spammer, and all I would have to do would be to travel to Nigeria to meet the son of the late former Treasurer who was brutally murdered in a coup.
Geek Of The Day, "A geeky place for geeky faces."
Let's assume he "only" sent spam to 200,000 people. Thse people took 5 seconds of worktime to delete it. Ballpark an estimate 15$ hourly wage and you've got 4,000$ of lost productivity here. Now realize that,according to the article, it's likely to be closer to 2,000,000,000 than to 200,000. Possibly even more.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
A lot of the time these people buy lists from other SPAMers who "tell" tehm that the list they are buying is "opt-in". When the hammer comes down they tell the authorities "The guy I bought it from said they where all opt-in, how was I to know"? It's all circular bullshit.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
In this case the victim is Microsoft because they run Hotmail, which received (and had to wade through) beaucoup spam from this asshole. If you had a Hotmail account, I suppose you could be entitled to some of this, but since you paid zilch for it in the first place you get zilch out of this.
If you run your own mail server, you may be entitled to sue the guy yourself. Good luck on that.
The CAN-SPAM law specfically restricts these sorts of lawsuits to ISPs, but I'm not certain of the details. Either way it's probably best to let a large corporation conduct this sort of lawsuit, because it'll cost you a fortune to sue the guy for the relatively small sums you'll get. It's unfortunately to have your right to sue removed, but in this case it's probably not worth your effort anyway.
... charge spammers $1.00 for each spam they send payable to receipient.
Last tally i'd be getting >2200.00 / day USD. I'd be happy to even click "Mark folder read" for that price.
Shadus
What are you going to do with the 7 million, sir?
Oh, just throw it on the pile, I suppose.
I'm sending you this letter because recently Microsoft won a lawsuit against an e-mail spammer that netted a 7 million dollar payout. Since you have received some of this spam, Microsoft would like to send you your portion of the settlement.
Please contact me for your share of 7 million dollars!
Think of spammers as Harcourt Fenton Mudd.
Fight Spammers!
...did an interview with Richter for a story called "High Volume Email Deployer". You really have to see this to appreciate what a moron Richter is. Not only was he stupid enough to agree to be interviewed by them, he was too stupid to realize they were making a fool of him.
[sarcasm]Remember how when MS was suppose to pay California schools they did it in software?
Yeah. Turns out, this is how this guy is going to pay his bill.
The Good News: MS Campus is about to get all the verbal Viagra and "male enhancement" products they'd ever want!
The Bad News: MS Campus is going to have bigger dicks then ever before....
[/sarcasm]
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
I don't think that being a spammer should get you locked up
Why not? Why should spammers be able to steal and not face jail time? What is the cost for the stolen bandwidth? What is the cost of the stolen storage? What are the administrative costs spent dealing with the theft of bandwidth and storage by spammers?
If an ISP has to buy five more mail servers, an OC3 line, and add four more drives to his RAID system to store the spam, why shouldn't those who caused the ISP to bear that cost face jail time?
Every time an employee receives spam, it takes them some period of time to recognize it as spam and delete it -- usually more if it's forwarded to a Blackberry or other mobile device. Why should employers have to bear these costs for disruptive spam and have the spammer not face jail time?
Are we just trying to keep jails empty so that the radical right can have cells to lock up college kids caught with pot at rock concerts? Where the hell are our priorities?
1. This was not a legal victory at all, it was a settlement. From TFA:
Microsoft knows that game very well. Settling out of court really doesn't do anything legally.
And how financially painful was it for Richter to pay that $7 mil? If he made 20, then that isn't much of a deterrant at all. Microsoft knows this game very well also.
All in all, I think the whole thing reeks. Especially since $7 mil is couch-cusion money to them. They basically bought themselves a PR story with the lawsuit (look at Microsoft, they are anti-spam!). All this story tells me is that spamming pays if he can afford to pay $7 mil and still be in business, and that those who have the means to sue will benefit from everyone else's pain.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
RTFA.
Additionally, as part of the settlement, Richter agreed to drop bankruptcy proceedings filed in March in the U.S. bankruptcy court in Denver, according to a joint statement by Microsoft and Richter. The settlement is conditioned on dismissal of the bankruptcy cases.
Here's an excellent interview with Scott Richter from The Daily Show: Scott Richter Interview (9.9MB, Windows Media)
Hey, do you guys know what spammers do?
They specialize in moving around and hiding their resources so that they can't be easily tracked. If Richter can do it with e-mail, he can do it with any money he has. Whether he declares bankruptcy or not, I don't expect Microsoft to see $7M. I don't think Richter ever had $7M in the first place. Spammers don't make that kind of money. If they did, there would be a lot more of them than they are, and the stuff they would be promoting would be more substantive than home mortgage affilliate schemes and penis enlargement pills.
Spammers are no different than Rappers or Late-night, get-rich-quick spokespeople. They create the illusion of wealth in order to lend credibility to their efforts. Unfortunately, when you watch those videos of spammers on boats and driving Lambos, they're rented, just like the fancy beach house all those make-fast-money people use as the setting for their infomercial. It's all a big crock.
I'm not saying these people don't make money, but it's nowhere near as much as they'd lead you to believe. Their whole modus operandi is about deception so they're sure as hell going to misrepresent their net worth as well.
This is a huge boon to that loser Richter, to even think that he was willing to "settle" paying someone $7M. He comes off like he has the money. There's no way in hell he does IMO.
I stumbled across this site a few months ago: Spam. Don't Buy It. It's an educational campaign to convince people not to buy stuff from spammers. There's a nice diagram of the spam business cycle, illustrating how few customers the spammer really needs to make a profit.
No it doesn't.
If you take a look at the medium terms risks facing Microsoft, one with significant impact is spam making the Internet unusable and thus slowing the growth in home computing, desktop software, and associated server software sales.
Microsoft should have a huge interest in stopping spam. They also have Hotmail and lots of cash, plus probably a few lawyers. They need to be seen to be willing to take losses to stop spam.
Actually, this is not a completely unreasonable number. According an article from Netscape.com a few weeks ago, it says that 10% of people have bought something from a spam email. So, there's at least some basis, even if it's misinterpreted.
Of course, even the dumbest of the dumb get thousands of spams and probably only make one or two orders for a total of maybe $100 total.
According to Paul Graham in Hackers and Painters (IIRC), there is about either a 0.1% to 0.01% success rate per spam.
Generally, the cost of a spam (for bandwidth usage, the inconvenience of finding a hackable server, etc), runs about 0.1 to 0.01 cents per email.
Unfortunately (well, fortuneately for them), barring getting caught, this still makes sending spam a very profitable process.
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"Well, the bridge didn't fall all the way down!"