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Jailed Spam King Caught Conspiring to Kill Witness
An anonymous reader writes "Spam king Christopher William Smith, aka Rizler, is facing up to life in prison for conspiracy to tamper with a witness and up to 20 years for endeavoring to obstruct justice. The charges are based on an alleged phone call in which he threatened to have a witness or the witness' family killed to prevent them from testifying against him in an upcoming trial on drug and related charges.
I could be wrong, but his spamming and his current indictment seem unrelated.
From the article:
"Although Smith allegedly built his pharmacy business from spam-related profits, it doesn't appear that Smith actually sent spam to advertise the pharmacy sites. Witnesses told investigators that he bought ads in magazines and had sales reps field calls at the Burnsville, MN offices of Online Payment Solutions."
And from a previous article on him, it would seem that he spammed stuff different from his pharmacy biz.
The latter seems to be the reason he tried silencing a witness, and it was for something that seems to be unrelated to his spamming biz.
yes, i constantly get death threats for closing port 25... ;-)
We can only hope his ass is now the recepticle for junk male...
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Having opt-out's slain is frowned upon by the legal system.
[Fooz] In a perfect world... spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with many men who have enlarged their penisses, taken Viagra and are looking for a new relationship.
Looks like we are one step closer to this "perfect world" Fooz speaks of!
Remember, when you're going to call someone from jail to discuss killing a witness have them steal your attorney's cell phone first...
WTF is this world coming to? Our children turn evil this quick now?
p g
http://www.spamdailynews.com/uploads/rizler_003.j
I mean good lord. He amassed that kind of wealth that quickly, is now in jail and was threatening to kill another human being.
So sad...I don't feel bad for him, per se...but it makes me sick...
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
...he received an unsolicited add for a hitman and decided to try it out.
William Smith
Murcielago - $230,000.00
Houses in Prior Lake and Burnsville - 1 Million dollars
Being a high school dropout spammer stupid enough to use a jail phone to arrange a hit - Priceless!
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Spammers are sociopaths. It seems for a lot of them that their disregard for basic decency also includes a disregard for basic adherence to the law. I bet a lot of them are guilty of actual definite crimes. It's just a matter of finding what they are. But we can find out who a lot of them are.
It's called "crime". You don't need to be a psych major to understand it. It's the use of force or fraud to get what you want. "Normal" people use non-coercive means to get what they want, like money, or persuasion, or begging.
I was talking with a friend this morning about whiners, children who throw screaming tantrums in store to get the candy they want. Most children try it, and if they manage to get away with it, the whining can become a permananent part of their psyche. I've actually seen college kids engage in pouting tantrums.
Chronic riminal behavior is probably similar. As a kid this guy probably stole money from his mom's purse and got away with it. He got caught stealing a pack of gum from the store, but his mom let him get away with it. He probably discovered that his mother would believe him no matter how outrageous his lies. You know his mother, she's the one that always says "my little boy would never do something like that." Thus, he learns that theft and lying are an acceptable means of getting what you want.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I think that should be the message here. No matter how annoying spam is, it's seldom seen as the type of crime that anybody should really worry about. A lot of people probably don't even see it as a "crime" -- and by people, read legislators. The message from this story is that the kind of people who put together large-scale, organized spam operations are not only a financial burden on society but they are also, sometimes, serious scumbags. Think Al Capone and tax evasion; spam operations should be seen as a red flag for a gray-market mentality, at minimum. Dig a little further and you could find other, more serious criminal operations.
Breakfast served all day!
Oh, how nice. "Not recently". How moral and upstanding!
... torture, really, for moral men to hear. This "not as bad as Hussein" angle is not just that; it's propaganda.
... it's TORTURE. And the only thing that's not stopping it is that there isn't a higher military power to invade the US to enact the necessary regime change.
The backpedaling and endless justifications for American torture practice and methods are just
What the US is doing is not just "humiliation"
Do not confuse the US "humilation of prisoners" with civil treatment by a moral society. Even the rules of war (to which the US professes to be a subscriber) prohibit the things that America now routinely does to prisoners taken in the Middle East. Hypocrisy, hypocrisy, hypocrisy!
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
Some prisoners definitely were tortured to death by U.S. forces in Iraq. From one of Seymour Hersh's pieces: "Two Iraqi faces that do appear in the photographs are those of dead men. There is the battered face of prisoner No. 153399, and the bloodied body of another prisoner, wrapped in cellophane and packed in ice. There is a photograph of an empty room, splattered with blood." So yes, some of it was "honest-to-god death-inducing torture." Prisoners were also tortured to death in Afghanistan. Get your facts straight.
I know this is a bit off the topic of the discussion, but it just pisses me off when people try to whitewash the behavior of the Bush Administration, and offer pathetic excuses like "we didn't torture people as much as Saddam Hussein". Here's a hint: if the only way to put your country's behavior in a positive light is by drawing a comparison to a psychotic, sadistic, murderous dictator, your country is doing something really, really fucked up and wrong.
The twenty year sentence, or any kind of punishment, sort of assumes someone actually reports the rape. It also assumes that the report is taken seriously by the guards rather than ignored. Most victims will not even report it in the first place, especially in prison, where informing on another inmate can get you killed. And many prison administrators routinely ignore and even encourage rape in prisons. The rapist is usually not likely deterred by a theoretical 20-year sentence that he will never have to serve.
You're half right: Nazis aren't funny. Killing Jews isn't funny. Jokes about them can be funny IF (and this is a very big IF) the joke is a means to relieve tension in an absurd and/or awful situation. People need to joke about terrible things to make sense of the world. Gallows humor. Black comedy. I get that. I even like that.
However: jokes about killing Jews are not funny if the point is to take the actual killing of Jews less seriously. Or to turn killing Jews into entertainment.
Likewise, in this case, if the joke was intended to relieve tension on the agreed horor of prison rape, I'd laugh. That wasn't the point. It never is. People really think prison rape is funny. In and of itself. But it's not. Real torment never is. It's also bad for society. It's bad for you.
Clueless people my ass.
Cheers.