Slashdot Mirror
British Spammer Gets 6 Years
Killjoy_NL writes "The BBC tells us that a 23 year old spammer has been sentenced to 6 years in prison for sending spam and other illegal activities." From the article: "He had offered thousands of e-mail and website names when he had no right. And when victims complained, he threatened to destroy their internet systems by sending millions of spam e-mails. Peterborough Crown Court heard he also threatened to fire-bomb the headquarters of the county's trading standards department and petrol-bomb his local police headquarters. When internet policing group Nominet posted warnings about his activities, he responded by saying he would attack its servers." ZDNet has coverage as well.
FTA
Peter Francis-Macrae, of St Neots, Cambs, was found guilty of threatening to kill and blackmail.
Yes, he was a spammer but that's not what he was sentenced for.
Bradley Holt
I'm sure it's easy to dismiss out of hand comments about bomb-threats from some random guy as actually being serious, but they must be taken seriously and from the proliferate amount of threats and general assholery, surely this guy deserves more than six years as a life lesson.
At first glance you think "6 years for spam...damn that's harsh". Then you read what else he did and you think "damn, only 6 years"?
This was a lot less about his spamming activities and a lot more about the "threatened to fire-bomb the headquarters of the county's trading standards department and petrol-bomb his local police headquarters." part.
The fact that he was also a spammer is a side-story. Had he not done the other stuff, I'm sure he'd still be happily spamming away.
And after looking at the picture, what a smarmy little punk.
I know it's nice to think some guy peddling generic viagra got put away for 6 years but this guy seems to have other serious issues:
"The 23-year-old was also convicted of threatening to destroy or damage property, concealing criminal property and fraudulent trading. "
It doesn't appear he was even charged with spamming, "Francis-Macrae was found guilty of two counts of fraudulent trading, one of concealing criminal property, two of making threats to kill, one charge of threatening to destroy or damage property and one count of blackmail. ".
And when he's making 100k pounds per week I doubt that many ppl are paying for junk, he prob was scamming somehow.
Jackass. Interesting that this particular model citizen didn't stop with mere spamming, but added arson threats and murder threats to his repitoire. Hopefully, this will serve to further erase the fictitous dividing line between spammers and "real criminals".
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
'Vindictive' UK spammer jailed for six yearsl ed/
http://www.theregister.com/2005/11/17/spammer_jai
Good news!
I think it was this guy.
He sent out fake renewal notices to people, using whois data. The notices asked for a renewal fee of around £60 for 2 years renewal.
I reported that company several times to trading standards, as my line of work was in the same area, and it was affecting my customers who would get in contact and ask about their renewal status, that they'd sent in the cheque a while ago... this happened dozens of times, and I was running a tiny internet company.
His response? He moved his company to a Mailboxes Etc (Regent Street, Cambridge, UK) that I also used, thus sullying my companies name. Mailboxes Etc were not interested in the fact that their customer was a scammer.
2 year sentence. Ahhh, the oldest democracy, nice to see we have our priorities spot on.
Deleted
Now hopefully he'll know the feeling of having unwanted items shoved into his inbox. Or outbox, depending upon your view of that type of thing....
"During the trial, Francis-Macrae defied Judge Nicholas Coleman QC by refusing to reveal where he hid up to £425,000, saying Cambridgeshire Police would "steal" it."
That'd be an outrage if he really ends up with all that, they should make a condition he never gets released unless he says where he hid the cash if he withdrew it or moves it all back into the UK if he transferred his profits offshore. Otherwise he should rot in jail forever.
Wouldn't a death threat be "unsolicited?"
It was the malevolence of his threats which sunk him.
Peterborough Crown Court heard he also threatened to fire-bomb the headquarters of the county's trading standards department and petrol-bomb his local police headquarters.
Just the spamming alone wouldn't have got him such a sentence.
Backward%20compatibility%20is%20over-rated
Okay, at least his dad. According to the BBC article,
Francis-Macrae, who made more than £100,000 per week from the scam, spent £28,000 on designer clothes and on learning to fly helicopters
If any of my offspring are over 18 and wandering around the house in an outfit that's more than my mortgage payment, they best get packing - quickly. Oh, and they need to get that helicopter out of the front yard - it's murder on the azaleas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gondwanaland
Apart from the incorrect spelling, Gondwanaland was one of two supercontinents resulting from the breakup of Pangaea. (The other was Laurasia.) It came into existence around 200 million years ago, then began to break up around 160 million years ago.
Nominet is hardly a policing organisation. They are operate the registry for uk. and so I expect they got a lot of complaints about him and decided to warn other people.
Also his main crime was not spamming, but simple fraud: offering to sell that which he was not entitled to sell.
This is poor sub-editing even by Slashdot, and BBC technology, standards.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
B (terrorists) is a superset of A (terrorists with political motives>, so for every x in A, x in B is implied; I believe we agree on that. What you just said is that x is not a member of A, therefore he isn't a member of B too, which logically is flawed.
What do you call someone who threats to bomb a building unless they are offered a large amount of money? Do they have to actually bomb the building to earn the title "terrorist"?
I speak England very best
for whatever reason
For whatever reason?!? THAT IS THE FRAUD! Good God man! They sent him money because he sent out notifications to domain name holders based on WHOIS info and told them to pay up or lose their domain name.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
Interesting, you believe that fraud should be legal because only irresponsible people would "fall for it"? I can't really argue that point any more than saying I disagree.
But, hey, thanks for the name calling, that's very mature! And kudos for the straw-man there too, if you can't argue the point argue the opponent!
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
A month? Spam costs corporations a lot of money, I can't estimate it though. If it takes you 1 minute to filter the spam out of your e-mail, and half a billion people have e-mail accounts, spammers are responsible for half a billion minutes per day. Time is money, and that's a lot of money. Spammers make foolish people on the internet lose their money as well.
I feel that spammers should get at least a year in prison. A second in jail for every e-mail sent sounds reasonable. If an e-mail takes a second to delete, even though it actually takes longer, the criminal is making up for his crime equally with the wasted time of the victims. If one spammer sends 1 million e-mails a day, that's 11 days per day of spam.
Make your computer faster: rm -rf
Yuck! Helicopters. He deserves far more. I'm just glad he hasn't made himself a real part of the aviation community! My theory on helicopters: They can't really fly, they're just so ugly, the Earth repels them.
Make your computer faster: rm -rf