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Spammer Gets $11 Billion Fine
Spad writes "It's not a typo, The Inquirer (amongst others) is reporting that an Iowa-based ISP has been awarded $11.2 billion in a case against spammer James McCalla, who was found guilty of sending over 280 million illegal spam emails. Under state law, the ISP was entitled to $10 per illegal e-mail sent. According to the Quad-City Times, McCalla has also been banned from using a computer for 3 years. From the article: "CIS acknowledged that it is unlikely to see any of the judgment money but said that it was time that spammers learnt that their actions would result in an economic death penalty"."
Are you allowed to declare bankrupcy if you owe money via criminal court order?
This dude just got F'd in the A.
Ehh...this is the life we chose.
That's ok. MR JAMES MCCALLA read an email a week ago about how to get out of debt by declaring bankruptcy.
CIS acknowledged that it is unlikely to see any of the judgement money but said that it was time that spammers learnt that their actions would result in an economic death penalty.
Why does that sentence look weird?
(going to google.com)
define: learnt
---No definitions were found for learnt.
Well at least we learnt one thing today.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
More of this needs to happen to show Spammers that it's not going to be economically feasable to spam ppl anymore. I'm surprised more ISPs aren't shutting more and more of these folks down, but I guess open relays, anon proxies and zombie machines (everywhere) give the spammers a good choice of SMTP options. Personally I love my server setup to deal with Spam: greylisting -> postfix -> mailscanner -> razor2 -> pyzor -> dcc checks -> spam assassin -> clamav -> bitdefender -> mailscanner -> ~/Maildir I haven't had a real spam get into my INBOX in months, and I update my SA rules and virus defs nightly. I wish more would create these kinds of blocks and stick them in front of more and more mailservers...would help cut down on the spam, thus stopping more of it from being clicked on, thus cutting down on the economics of it all. Having a user click a 'this is spam' button is after the fact. I'm also a fan of tarpitting, though I haven't set it up...yet. Since I keep a list of spammers now, I can use that list once I have la brea or the like setup, thus hurting spammers more by tying up their sending boxes. Anyone have other ideas on how to automate this return fight?
fak3r.com
I have no sympathy for this guy, and I nope the other spammers will take this as a hint. Every time I receive an e-mail offering me Viagra I take it as a personal insult ;)
Perhaps he should contact his friend in Nigeria.
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
...their actions would result in an economic death penalty.
How about a real one?
So you equate a sentence for spamming with a sentence used on serial murderers and the like? What even happened to that whole "let the punishment fit the crime" doctrine? I think the financial penalty along with any possible jail time is plenty.
Frank: Gentlemen, I propose we send a message to tobacco companies everywhere by fining the Spammers infinity billion dollars!
Congressman: That's the spirit Frank! But I think a real number might be more effective.
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:vu0EKWi4lTYJ:ww w.hamilton-co.org/cinlawlib/resources/303cv80109.p df+%22James+McCalla%22+%2Bspam&hl=en
How is counting every infringing download of a song equivalent to purchasing the album at full retail? You've got to pick a number somewhere.
I think they should have cut his nuts off instead.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Would someone please forward the following to James McCalla for me, it seems they've been trying to reach him for some time!
----
FREELOTTO GROUP INTERNATIONAL
Prize Remittance Division (PRD)
RE: OFFICIAL WINNING NOTIFICATION
FILE REF NO: 07- 321786542
FAST NO: 2912144
LOTTO REF: FL/0507/FAST
Dear Prize Winner,
This email confirms that you have received from the FREELOTTO GROUP INTERNATIONAL an official notification of your lotto winning in the FREELOTTO AUTOMATIC SUBSCRIPTION TICKET GAME (F.A.S.T) played on the 1st of january 2006, at our lottery office complex Trafford, London.
You have won a FREELOTTO PRIZE OF £ 500,000 [five hundred thousand pounds sterlings], a prize payout of your winning has been approved by the FREELOTTO GROUP. In accordance with the United Kingdom lottery ordinance, you are authorized as the lotto prize winner to request claims of your winning prize.
The FREELOTTO AUTOMATIC SUBSCRIPTION TICKET (F.A.S.T) GAME is an online promotional program organized by the FREELOTTO GROUP INTERNATIONAL. A total of 500,000 different email addresses are entered for the FREELOTTO AUTOMATIC SUBSCRIPTION TICKET GAME (F.A.S.T).
SINCERELY,
ROBERT A. V. BENARD,
GROUP PRESIDENT - FLG
fak3r.com
This is an interesting judgement. I mean, almost everything uses computers in one way or another - cars have computers in them, is he banned from using a car?
I can get mired in technicalities, it is obvious the judgement refers to a personal computer. But that line does get fuzzy. Does an iPod count? A PDA? A cell phone?
Also, given how essential computer use is nowadays, this almost infringes on barring the pursuit of life, liberty yadda yadda. Yes he committed a crime, but it is almost to the point where essential tasks cannot be performed, but on a pc. And in three years, who knows.
"The Iowa court was told the defendants 'falsely and illegally' represented that their e-mails originated from the CIS domain The e-mails used the cis.net as a return address to disguise the source of the e-mails to avoid complaints."
IANAL, but I'm guessing forging the ISP's address in the header has something to do with it. Seems perfectly fair to me; it's not legal to forge someone's signature in meatspace either.
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
From QuadCity Times: The lawsuit claimed that McCalla sent more than 280 million illegal spam e-mail messages into CIS's network...
He claimed that under state law in effect at the time, he was entitled to $10 per illegal e-mail.
Kramer said then that he likely will not see any of the judgment money.
Then what precisely, would be the point? If the claim is that this will somehow economically damage a spammer, when in fact not even a single dollar may be paid out ultimately to the aggrieved party. Not to mention the ruling is in Iowa but the spammer is in Florida, so there may be jurisdictional disputes, reciprocity or not.
This is merely smoke and mirrors, to make some people feel like they are doing their part in the war on spam. I don't see spam drying up. It seems to be getting worse. There has to be a real crackdown, perhaps even prison time if any inroads are to be made.
Wake me when they string this spammer up to a tall tree by his thumbs.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
McCalla has also been banned from using a computer for 3 years.
br? No porn for you!
If big boobed women work at Hooters do one legged women work at IHOP?
Ok. Let me preface this by saying I'm all for getting rid of spam and spammers.
That said, 11 BILLION dollars? That's more than the GDP some nations.... it's not only improbable that they'll collect, but what is the real point of asessing such a sum? They might have assigned a billion gazillion trillion quillion dollars for all that amount matters. My concern is "how will that help deal with the rest of them", so my cheering for this judgement is a bit tempered by the insanity of the judgement. Indebting an individual or even small group of individuals with 11 billion dollars is just as bad against spammers as the idiotic size of the RIAA lawsuits from a few years ago - last thing we need is sympathy for spammers because the hammer of justice fell too hard....
"* LAWSUITS AND JUDGMENTS
The filing of either a Chapter Seven straight bankruptcy or Chapter
Thirteen debt adjustment immediately stops any lawsuits from being filed
or judgments being taken against you. If a law suit is pending at the
time of such filing, it can go no further. If a judgment has been
taken, its enforcement can go no further. If a creditor has a judgment
and is garnishing your wages, the garnishment can be stopped. Filing
for Chapter Seven straight bankruptcy may relieve you of the obligation
to pay the judgment. In a Chapter Thirteen debt adjustment, you may be
able to satisfy the judgment over a period not to exceed five years. If
the judgment has placed a lien on your home, that lien can be removed if
it interferes with your homestead. If lawsuits or judgments are a
threat or reality, the protection afforded under the bankruptcy laws may
be an appropriate solution for you."
It appears that in some states the law is a little different, but generally the answer is yes, you can file bankruptcy.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
Someone once calculated that the amount of time it takes you to download a spam message, identify it as spam, delete it, multiplied by the number of spam messages, equals a time equivilent to many of lifetimes.
So, collectively, his spamming robbed humanity of lifetimes worth of time that could have been spent doing something else.
But I do agree with you. Death sentences for spammers is just silly.
that will provide him with the money, if he in turn helps this high official in wiring money to the US.
The sentence isn't about the criminal, it's about potential criminals. Whether or not this guy gets rehabilitated is almost (not quite) immaterial to the real goal: to make the cost of the crime (risk of getting caught * penalty assessed) greater than the benefit.
The lower the risk of being caught, the larger the penalty assessed has to be to compensate. Obviously, as in this case, there are functional limits. The size of the penalty, past some point, makes no difference; it spells economic death for the penalized. Simultaneously, people are very, very bad at assessing risk in personal decisions, so there's a floor beyond which the risk is too small to make up in penalty, regardless. Spam, unfortunately, is still in the category of "risk too small to worry about" crimes.
But that's the thinking behind the sentence. Obviously, an $1.1E10 fine is just hand-waving in terms of this particular case; this is just to set the stage, as it were.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
How about 1 second of community service for each illegal e-mail, based on the amount of time he's wasted of someone else's life. Something like 15 years of picking up trash would seem fitting.
...and the spelling nazis at the same time! Guess I learnt my lesson :(
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
To let the punishment fit the crime, a source of innocent merriment would be to let everyone he spammed slap him in the face--once for each spam. "He's no fun, he fell right over!"
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I don't know why you everyone is hung up about the $$$ fine. What is the man supposed to do without World of Warcraft, Internet Porn, and /. for 3 years?
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
I can't even begin to tell you how many times I've passed up opportunities to get laid because I was just too busy deleting spam...
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
By economic death penalty they must refer to something that is never actually carried out, delayed by infinite appeals and more for show than anything else. They'll never get a dime of those billions, the spammer will continue to spam (check out http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=200 5601040360 - if the legal system won't do anything about a woman who was caught three times driving with a suspended license to her probation officer they won't do anything significant about a spammer) and people like me will lose ever more faith in the system.
We have people awarding impossible fines with full knowledge that they will never be recovered (ie: they knowingly refused to mete out justice since their "justice" is only something that exists on paper and in their fantasy world). We have judges who order restraining orders against David Letterman because somebody claimed he was using psychic powers to harass her. We have people who will devote months of their lives to sit on juries and render verdict even though everybody knows from the start that what the jury says is irrelevant because everything gets rewritten on appeal anyway.
The system is broke. The overlords of the system don't care; these people have much less respect for the law than the criminals they try in their courts.
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
280,000,000 * 5 seconds / 3600 second per hour / 24 hours per day / 365 days per year ~ 44 years
And, that is just for the amount of emails that he got caught spamming. Also, some people spend less than 5 seconds deleting spam emails and some people spend more.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
Let the punishment fit the crime went out with the "War on Drugs" Now it is punish the H*LL out of them and hope they do not do it again.
Example:
4oz of Pot = 25-life Years in jail
Forcing a Child to preform a sexual act on camera = 15-30 Years in Jail
1 Count of Child Molestation = 10-20 years in Jail
Murder = 25-Life Years in Jail
Let them cancel half the debt, then report the income to the IRS and then file a report with the IRS that these guys are committing the tax fraud and send dicovery documents to to IRS and then collect the reward of the money from the IRS. That way the IRS can crawl up their ass with a microscope, then they still get some money from that.
Fight Spammers!
Last I heard MacDonalds was initially assessed damages equivalent to a couple of days' coffee sales (or profits?) in a case where they were singularly arrogant (and idiotic) in their own defense. The pop media turned that into a case for tort reform, and it eventually got settled for less money -- but people still whinge about how unjust it was that the old lady with the skin grafts on her crotch got too much cash from the multinational company.
The individual who tries to
I'm no fan of SPAM, but this is out of hand. In general extreme punishments to make an example of people disgust me. Justice has to be proportionate.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
It is my understanding that bankruptcy will not discharge a judgment for an intentional act. The question then becomes, does spamming in that case become an intentional act. That's is why OJ still has the judgment against him.
Fight Spammers!
Probably not the easiest thing to do:
1. Although most spammers are trying to sell "products", there are plenty (Nigeria, Phishing, etc) that don't.
2. It's extremely easy to accept credit cards (takes about 2 days to use PayPal-- I'm sure it's similar for other companies)-- Placing the burden of spammer-checking on the credit card gateways (or parent companies) would significantly increase the cost to businesses of accepting credit cards.
3. It's be rather easy for me to spam YOUR product in an attempt to (a) blackmail you, or (b) get credit card companies to drop you (in the case of a competitor).
3a. It would be equally easy for you to spam and then claim that it's actually me doing it.
4. What about companies that accept PayPal (or similar)?
Personally, I think we're on the right track. Tougher laws, better technology. I don't think we need more to add more bloat to the process of selling products.
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
CIS (the ISP) was asking for punative damages equal to the (original) statuatory damages, which the judge granted them. Plus RICO and the Iowa Ongoing Criminal Conduct Act allowed them to tripple the statuatory damages. So, instead of paying $10/email, they ended up paying $40/email. See the Court docs here.
After 10 years or so, we've finally arrived at the stage where we threaten the only thing that matters to the spammers: Their money.
This might be a good turning point, especially with these ridiculously silly amounts which actually do mean that life, economically, is over for you. Everything the guys ever earns above and beyond whatever the minimum-for-life-that-you-can't-legally-take-away is in his jurisdiction will go poof, for the rest of his years.
In other words, the spam equation just changed from "make tons of money, if caught, lose some and continue" to "make tons of money, if caught you're pretty much dead". That's a different game.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The ISP isn't guilty of anything. It's the old handgun thing... The ISP only provides the weapons, if you're the fool who uses those to do harm, then you take the punishment. I would also think that the ISP covered their legal butts with an acceptable use policy.
OK. A spammer gets fined $11e9 for spamming. MS gets a slap on the wrist for its behavior. What's wrong with this picture?
Change the law to affect the party that stands to profit from whatever action the email suggests AND the party that sent the mail.
OK, so let's do a scenario. You own "Divide By Zero's Friendly Software Store" and I own "Alizarin's Discount Software, Bowling, and Small Appliance Emporium." I don't like the fact that you get more business than I do, so I contract a spammer under the table (and possibly by saying I'm you) to send out some spam advertising your company's mail-order services. Somebody reports it, and your company, as the supposed initiator and advertiser, is fingered. So you get fined/shutdown/whatever, and I laugh all the way to the bank.
I do make some assumptions about evidence, but still, is it really that far fetched?
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
Yeah, but his computer takes two weeks to deliver!
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
$280m * $10 = $2.8b ( != $11b )
maybe they converted to Canadian for bigger effect...
It's only a model.
Well, yes, actually.
Minor inconvenience x 280 million = One Big Freaking Inconvenince to Society.
And as they say: if you can't do the time, don't send the spam.
Was the illegal act the fact that the emails went through the network or that the spam had cis.net in the return address?
In other words was the issue that the spam was tying up CIS' network, or that the spammer was making them look bad by pretending to be one of their users?
Any thoughts?
I think neither, it's simily that the spam law, as written, forbids sending bulk commercial email with a 'deceptive' return address that wasn't the sender's. The return address could have just as well been public.com (bombed out of existence years ago by some spamware program having a hardcoded return address of friend@public.com) or example.com (the one domain name that's truly not available).
If this guy didn't have enough legal troubles, CIS can now sue for civil damages for the reasons you just gave.
Tag lost or not installed.
Let's see, paid for ads on TV and in print pay for most of the cost of producing the product. Like it or not if you watch TV or read a magazine the ads are what allow you to do so.
Spam, on the other hand pays for nothing. It uses up bandwidth, admin time, CPU time, in other words it costs lots of money for us all.
Yes, it's true! The ISP was indeed awarded $11,600,000,000. However, it's currently locked away in a foreign bank account. I am the only person with access to the money. But, I need your help... If you wire $25,000 to me, I can retreive the full amount from the bank account. Then, we sill split the money, 50/50. And, you can trust me because I am the First Major Captain Commander of the Nigerian Bank Association. (Please send the $25,000 to be via PayPal).
Minor inconvenience x 280 million = One Big Freaking Inconvenince to Society.
No argument here, but they say its $10 per infraction, right? Well, being really good at math as all us geeks are, that comes to $2.8 billion. Where do they get $11 billion? So were talking $8.2 billion in punitive damages? ouch. Thats gonna leave a mark.
Sorry, I smoked my last sig
$11 billion? No problem. Now he has a reason to respond to the several debt consolidation services that advertise "a low monthly payment", and the home equity loan lines that "guarantee a loan despite bad credit". -- Hiten