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Another Major Spammer Busted
Iphtashu Fitz writes "25 year old Christopher William Smith, considered one of the worlds biggest spammers by the Spamhaus Project, is now sitting in a jail without bond. Smith allegedly had a doctor issue 72,000 prescriptions in the space of one year in conjunction with orders obtained through spamming. The doctor, Philip Mach, had a license to practice medicine in New Jersey but he provided prescriptions to people throughout the United States without ever evaluating them, both of which are big no-no's. Federal authorities have already seized over $3 million in cash, luxury cars, and houses."
Smith allegedly had a doctor issue 72,000 prescriptions in the space of one year
Which just goes to prove to be a really big drug dealer you need a computer and connections, not just to hang out in your Accura in McDonald's parking lot late at night.
* Nelson Muntz appears in this posting courtesy Twentieth Century Fox and Matt Groening.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Holy Crap! FTA: Prosecutors allege Smith had Mach issue about 72,000 prescriptions from July 2004 to about May 2005.
Now, I freely admit that I don't have a clue about how prescriptions are handled, but isn't 72,000 prescriptions just a little much? Would't someone have gotten a touch suspicious that this guy was writing them out at a rate of 1 prescription every 7 seconds? Or is there not enough infrastructure to be able to tell how many a doctor has written?
It obviously had to be done electronically (Or else he would have had to write an awful lot). How does that work? I've only ever had prescriptions that were hand written out by the doctor.
I guess I'm just amazed that it took them that long to realize something was wrong.
A man with a gun is called a citizen. A man without a gun is called a subject.
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Another Major Spammer Busted
Who gave those in charge a clue? It seems we're starting to see a paradigm shift... people who really abuse network resources are getting caught!
FLR
Spammers aren't the problem. They are just a symptom. Email is a broken standard. We need to create a system that cannot be taken advantage of.
We could even just add a bit onto the current email systems. Have clients either sign outgoing messages with a GnuPG key, or encrypt messages with the recipient's public key. All mail that isn't signed by a friend or encrypted to the recipient is trashed.
Spammers wouldn't have an accepted sig, and they sure wouldn't have the time to encrypt each message to each address.
What are you eating? isItVeg?.
I've always wondered about this. Do ERs have some sort of checklist / questions they ask to try and decide who is actually in pain, and who is just looking for the medicine? I was in the ER recently (thought it was appendicitis, was a ruptured cyst in my reproductive system.. so much fun, being a girl) and I had forgotten how many people use the ER for stuff like.. a hangnail, because they have little/no insurance. There was one person there who seemed to be in much more pain when any hospital officials were watching than when they were not. All she said she wanted was a refill of her medications. It made me wonder a little!
You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We'd all love to see the plan
(The Beatles)
Here's a little trick to stop spam that I literally discovered yesterday: take your mail server down for a while. Seriously. (Of course, this assumes that you have your own mail server, but I'm guessing a significant number of /.ers do.) Mine was unreachable yesterday because I forgot to renew my domain (heh, oops). Today I only recieved one piece of spam, and I'm sure that anything meaningful that didn't make it through yesterday got bounced back and will be resent. I dunno if it will last, but hey, its worth a shot.
I also remember hearing on TWiT that some guy has blocked all HTML e-mail outside of his whitelist to avoid spam, and it works. Seems a little too harsh though.
Unless he had the prescriptions filled at Pfizer's loading dock, WTF would you expect them to do about it? For all you know, they might have been the anonymous tipsters that got the whole prosecution started, but I know it's a lot more fun to rant and wildly speculate.
Your irrational hatred for the pharmaceutical companies does nothing to help your credibility.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Do ERs have some sort of checklist / questions
We used to... until JCAHO decided that it was a violation of confidentiality. Most ERs kept a "frequent flier" list of their drug seekers: a recipe box with index cards was the usual method, complete with name (including aliases), preferred drug, and typical cover stories used. Those boxes were absolutely invaluable for keeping patients from doctor-shopping by surfing from ER to ER, stocking up.
Thanks JCAHO... thanks a lot for leaning forward to help us in our fight against prescription drug diversion.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
I know a pretty big adult spammer, the trick is you have to know the owners / top guys at the companies you spam products for, then they will just "comply" with reported spam and "delete" accounts and whatnot when trouble shows up, but since you know the guys at the top, they just pay you anyways and give you new accounts to keep on spamming with since both parties are making tons of cash (he makes around $20k/month last time I knew off it, and has a shiney dodge viper in his driveway.)
They might've not, but the fact that this ass maggot spammed you, me, your dog, my cat, the prosecutor in the case, his daughter, hurricane Katrina and a billion other people made the authorities to notice him quite quickly.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
But only morons use HTML and if you want to have those advertising stuff companies call "newsletters", you can always allow it for them. Or are you that addicted to consuming that crap?
And please, don't come with that "but my good friends all use HTML in their emails". If your friends are mentally stuck in kindergarten and need pretty colors to prolong their attention span to read/write a whole email, then... suffer.
My website gets around 30 hits a minute (from seperate IPs) with fake referrer spam for sites selling prescription drugs. Anything with a drug name in the referrer, Phentermine, Xanax etc, gets an http 302 redirect to dea.gov; the original referrer isn't replaced. Who knows, maybe no one there ever looks at the logs, but if they do there's a few sites they might be interested in.
He was busted for something else right? Something related to illegal drug activity, wire fraud, money laundering...? Stuff like that?
So far, all this does is make "illegal" activities proliferated by spam something that will get you busted....
Hrm... okay so this WILL make a dent in the war on spam. But I would still like to see more people jailed for the activity of spamming rather than for more common reasons.
Wrong. Have you ever taken this stuff? The amount of the other non-opiate can not kill your pain what so ever when you have bad pain (go have back surgery, neck surgery, and join the chronic pain club).
Tylenol, aspirin, etc all of these destroy the GI track, liver, kidney's, etc... all because we don't like people having the feelings of euphoria.
Pain needs to be treated as a serious disease that needs to be managed very carefully to avoid the serious slippery slope of tolerance, heavy addiction, and destroying yourself with these other unaffective drugs. I know someone who has eaten holes in their stomach and killed their blood chemistry from years of OTC crap because they didn't want to take an opiate -- how crazy is that?!
So many doctors don't know how to treat pain. The ones that do are so fearful of the DEA, they mistreat patients and many times those patients develop drug-seaking behavior to get themselves out of pain.
Amazingly enough, Rush Limbaugh can take 30 oxycontin a day (schedule 2 drug, so much more powerful than vicodin) with very little documented medical condition and have his staff get drugs for him, and he gets off scott-free. Amazing -- truely amazing.