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Spammer Scott Levine Convicted
bani writes "Spammer Scott Levine was convicted of massive data theft from Acxiom Corporation. Prosecutors say his company, the now-defunct Snipermail.com, stole 1.6 billion customer records from Acxiom and sold the data. He faces a maximum of 640 years in prison under the law, though he will likely be sentenced to far less. One spammer down, several million to go?"
Only give him 1/10th of the maximum.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
i'm pretty sure noone has ever had to serve more than around 200 years in prison
They should put him in prison and make him write out every e-mail he ever sent with a pencil and paper. He gets out of jail whenever he is finished.
From TFA:
"We're very pleased with the outcome. We think it's the appropriate verdict," U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins said outside U.S. District Court.
As much as I dislike spammers, is 640 years appropriate for one man? He didn't even kill anyone. Maybe he should have gotten something more brutal, like 64000 hours of community service...as a tech support operator!
Every spammer that goes to jail for his actions is a victory. For one, it's quite well-known that most of the spam we see today originates from a relatively small group of people, so it's not exactly "one down, several more million to go"; and also, even if there were considerably more, the mere fact that they now know that they might go to jail for spamming just might be a deterrent. Spamming is pretty much a textbook example of whitecollar crime, and it's been shown that unlike with bluecollar crime (that is, more physical crimes, like assault, rape, robbery etc.), prison sentences actually do serve as a deterrent here.
Remember, spammers are cowards - and greedy cowards, for that matter. They do what they do to get rich quick, so the prospect losing their money in lawsuits and possibly going to jail afterwards will scare them quite a bit.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
"You are hereby sentenced to 640 years in jail, with parole in nine months"
ah, the law is an ass..
According to the ROKSO list there's only really a hundred or so Levines and Richters out there. They are collectively responsible for a huge percentage of all the spam though. The rest is sent by amateur spammers sending to a few tens of thousands of people. The real spammers on the ROKSO list have databases of 1 billion + addresses.
Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/
At first I thought the article title was referring to Levin, the founder of IRC network Freenode. He spams a lot too - he's constantly making wallop messages begging for cash to support the network because his lazy ass can't get a job.
Ron dies in chapter 9 of book 7.
"640 years should be enough for anyone"
Stealing is not exclusively defined as depriving someone else of something that belongs to them.
Most children know that stealing is taking something that does not belong to you, regardless of whether it is a copy or the original item.
Stealing has a lot to do with intent as well. If I take the wrong coat at a restaurant, I deprived it from someone else, but I didn't have the intent to do so, so it isn't stealing.
Besides, even by your deifinition, it IS stealing. The records were private, once they were copied, the company was deprived of its secrecy/privacy of those records. Same as stealing a password.
-David
1. A good start.
2. Not nearly enough.
3. What's wrong with a firing squad?
4. You mean those Pen1s En1argement Pi11s don't work???
The problem is, that most spammers are seen in the 'industry' (so to speak) as some of the best paid, their earnings from the illegal mailings dwarf what some porn websites make in a day, and that can be huge
As long as their is money in it, people will try their hardest to do it. It will be very hard to stop in the end, as for every spammer who goes down... 10 new kids with a copy of a mailing script pop up.
What would be better is taking down the companies who fund the illegal mail by paying comissions on the products advertised, no spammer would risk jail if they weren't getting paid.
Business Voyeur
He didn't? Let's assume (conservatively), that he sent out one spam per customer record he stole. 1.6 billion spams. Let's further assume that it takes a human being one second to "Just Hit Delete". 1.6 billion person-seconds wasted. 444,444 person-hours wasted. 18,518 person-days wasted. 50 person-years if you're working 24/7. At 8 hours a day, that's the entire productive lifespan of three people. Three lives - stolen just as effectively as if he'd killed them.
> Maybe he should have gotten something more brutal, like 64000 hours of community service...as a tech support operator!
64,000 hours, at 8 hours a day, is 40000 days, or 218 years, so you're not too far off the 640-year mark.
640 years ought to be enough for anybody, but what I'd really like to see is to have him locked in a cell, "Just Hitting Delete", once for every spam he sent, for 16 waking hours a day.
Four or five times a day, an email with a From: line like "Your Warden", "Health Services", or "Cafeteria" with a Subject: line such as "Extended recreation hours!", "Take a break!", or "Lunchtime!" will appear.
He has to reply to this mail to get an hour of exercise, have his medical checkups, or his meals.
Hey, it's just spam, right? Doesn't hurt anyone, right? Just delete it, right? Well, if he hasn't starved to death when he runs out of 1.6 billion spams on which to Just Hit Delete, he can walk away a free man.
So Acxiom lost 1.6 billion private records... what were they charged with for such shoddy security?
How much did they pay consumers for not protecting their data..?
What new standards did they have to agree to with the government..?
It's great to see a spammer taken down. But what about this Axciom company? According to the article, Axciom "serves large corporations by collecting and managing information for marketing purposes". Maybe they don't spam directly, but it sure sounds like they at least help spammers. And probably not just email spammers, but telephone and snail mail, as well. And apparently they're storing "personal customer records, including names, postal and e-mail addresses, bank and credit card numbers." [ephasis mine] Why does one company have so much information on so many people? And why when they are negligent with that data, do they not face any consequences?
The article seemed to imply that the snipermail spammers initially got access to more records than they were supposed to have because of something Axciom did (this isn't clear) before they started breaking passwords to get even more data. Where are the 600+ year prison terms for the Axciom management?
"Save the whales, feed the hungry, free the mallocs" -- author unknown
From what i can tell, he is being jailed for THEFT, not spam.
While i agree with most here that spam sux, there is a difference between being convicted of spamming and convicted of being a common thief.
So dont get too happy yet shouting 'spammers are toast'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"One spammer down, several million to go?"
According to spamhaus only about 200 individuals are responsible for nearly all the spam in the world. I know that seems incredible but they are in a position to know.
.
"One spammer down, several million to go?"
I heard that less than 200 people account for about 95% of all spam.
...Information just wants to be free. He didn't steal the information, he just copied it and shared it.
And how do we sentance a wrong do'er? Do we sentance based on each act, that every single peice of email is a seperate offense? Or do we sentance based on the whole of what he did? For example, if someone rapes one person, that is very different than if someone rapes 10 people. But what about spam?
This is a good point. The law seems to be intent on treating computer-related offences identically with "physical" crimes, although the notion of number of counts makes much less sense in the electronic context.
The same reasoning that brings us a potential 640 year verdict for a spammer (yay!) also leads to kids being subjected to $100 billion lawsuits (boo!). If you can do something online once, you can set it up to be done 1000 times -- is that a single offence, or 1000 of them?
I wonder if there is a way to change email, so before any email is passed on, there is some visual confermation that has to be entered by the sender.
Then the League for the Blind presses charges, you go to jail for violating the Rehabilitation Act and/or the Americans with Disabilities Act (or foreign counterparts), and once you're in prison, you get sexually assaulted by a blind man.
So the difference here is that one person has the ability to disturb the whole infrastructure fo the economy, and waste a lot of time and money.
As bad as they are, a violent criminal only disturbs a small segment of society.
So a data 'thief' is like a lawn mower and a violent criminal is like an ant eater.
Hello Cruel World
"OK, quote some laws then, because that opinion looks a lot like bullshit to me."
You're losing your way by -- as many, many Slashdotters do -- ignoring colloquial use and making the assumption that a law book is the only valid source here. This argument falls down when you think of all the other colloquialisms that are out there: for example, no lawbook will contain the phrase "kiddy porn" but we all know what it means.
English is a great, big, colorful language. We have "stolen kisses," "stealing your thunder," "theft of service" (as in cable or satellite TV), "stealing third base" (a baseball term), to "steal the show", to "steal away", "that item was a real steal" (as in bargain) and countless other examples that would set the "something must be permanently deprived!" Slashdot crowd into a frantic buzz.
If you're using Firefox, you can type "dict steal" into the address bar for more information.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
64,000 hours, at 8 hours a day, is 40000 days, or 218 years, so you're not too far off the 640-year mark.
Your numbers are off. 64,000 hours at 16 hours a day is 4,000 days, or 11 years. That's a reasonable sentence. The work could be laying bricks in Siberia or digging irrigation ditches in the Sahara. Five minute water/food break at lunchtime. Perhaps a toilet break mid-afternoon.
If you can steal a thousand people's credit card numbers and then use that information to commit fraud, you have committed a thousand crimes. If you can cause $100 billion in damage, then guess what, you're liable for the $100 billion. Fraud and theft are crimes, and the more people you steal from (regardless of the means), the more you get punished.
This sig has not been evaluated by the FDA. It is not designed to diagnose, treat, prevent, or cure any disease.
From what I've read, I have it pretty easy. Many people get a lot more than 50 a day. The time loss goes up when you count the mental context switching. Without the filters, I'd lose about an hour a day. I bill clients $125/hr for doing real work. That's a loss of $45,625 in billable time per year. With the filters active, I only process about 7 a day, so I only lose around $5,300 in billables.
Yeah, me too.Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
Can we get his cellmate's names and addresses? I would like to send his cellmate's some penis enlargment pills and cialis softtabs.
Fight Spammers!
From TFAs:
"There is no evidence that any individuals are at risk of harm due to the breaches," the company said. "It is also important to note that only one external server was accessed, and there was no intrusion of Acxiom's internal security firewalls or internal databases."
"The 1.6 billion records included names, home addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, bank and credit card numbers"
HAhaahahhahhahhaahahahaha. Yeah. what an excuse, no internal server was breached. And WTF was an "external" server doing containing all that information without any firewalls? Was thier security totally incompetent?
Not one red cent. She was questioned in an investigation and lied to the investigators. At no time was she read her rights, at no time was she told she was a suspect and she was never charged with a crime because of the investigation. All she was charged with was lying to protect herself. She was set up just like the victims of AbScam and just like John Delorean. Entrapment, pure and simple.
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All she was charged with was lying to protect herself. She was set up just like the victims of AbScam and just like John Delorean. Entrapment, pure and simple.
Lying to investigators is not entrapment, it is obstruction of justice.