Slashdot Mirror
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
Everyone gets spammed and somehow Microsoft gets $7M. How does that work?
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.
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."
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
Because they sued him and you didn't.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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
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!
And that kids is how you lie with numbers. That's like the RIAA saying that their losing hundreds of millions of dollars to pirates on the assumption that everyone who pirates would have otherwise bought the song legally.
Just because it takes 5 seconds to delete spam, you're assuming it's done on work time and if it is, then it's likely there's more productivity lost the employee even checking their mail at work. Not to mention that you can't measure productivity strictly as a function of time.
Not to mention that you're claimed productivity loss of $4 M is still less than the $7 M payed out by the spammer.
Obviously I'm not defending the jackass, but it annoys the hell out of me when people on slashdot hypocritically apply the same tactics that are disregarded and criticized (validly) when they're applied to software and music piracy (and yes, piracy is a perfectly valid term since language must evolve to meet the changing society). There's absolutely nothing insightful or interesting about your post.
I love math like this, I wonder what the lost productivity is for using the bathroom.
...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?
Here's an excellent interview with Scott Richter from The Daily Show: Scott Richter Interview (9.9MB, Windows Media)
I agree that it reeks. Microsoft gets their legal fees paid plus some extra dough for massive free advertising. I wouldn't mind it if the money went into some kind of public trust. But the fact that MS just gets an extra 7Mil means that they are beneficiaries of spam business. That's really more of an encouragement than a deterrent. Now any joe who can make 20 million will get slapped with a lawsuit by MS, MS will get their cut, and the spammer can retire. Great business model. Everybody wins except the people whose mailboxes are choked with Viagra flyers.