Spammers Fined A$5.5 million

Mick Bailey writes "A Perth company and it's director have been issued a A$5.5 million (approx. US$4 million) fine for breaching anti-spam laws. Australian IT watchers may be familiar with the director, Robert Mansfield — he's been personally fined A$1 million for the offenses. The Company, Clarity1, sent 280 million unsolicited emails of which 74 million hit mailboxes between 4/2004 and 4/2006."

Comments

Is it enough?

[jmagar.com]

I wonder if he's made enough money from the spam to cover this fine. It could turn out that this just becomes the cost of doing business...

I prefer to see jail time for these guys.

Re:Is it enough?

[AoT]

I'm just happy that laws such as these have reduced the amount of spam I recieve.

Oh, wait.

Damnit, they haven't.

Maybe someone needs to starts DOSing the sites that are advertised for in spam, then people would be afraid to go to spammers for advertising.

Re:Is it enough?

[uwnav]

YES! Jail! and the next time I seen them damn kids dropping flyers on my front porch.. I'll be waiting with my shotgun. Spam is annoying for me just as it is for the next person, but you still have to carry those flyers from the mailbox to the recycling bin (or put a recycling bin at my front door saying "Yes Flyers Please!") but that'd hardly the point.. I think jail-time would be somewhat extreme

Re:Is it enough?

[Jonny do good]

"But you need to look at the other side of things too. Anti-spam companies are making a lot of money from spam too."

Another cost that spammers should have to fund when they are caught. We shouldn't have to pay for anti-spam services, the spammers should.

Re:Is it enough?

[v1]

I suppose if you make 20B$, knowing you are risking a 5B$ fine is just the cost of doing business, and if it means clearing 15B$ proffit in a few years, why wouldn't you?

Lock them up instead. Fines are just business. Jail time is incentive to behave.

Coming up next...

[Anonymous Coward]

Coming up next: Spammer gets US court to order australia to stop interfering with his business, and tries to get them to order Icann to remove the .au TLD.

The gavel falls

[Dekortage]

The original court decision was handed down last April; this is the punishment. Additionally, when the case went to court in 2005, the courts handed Clarity1 an an injunction against sending more spam. So it sounds like Mansfield first violated the law, then violated a court injunction.

I wonder if he can pay the fine in e-mail promotion services?

Re:The gavel falls

[Arancaytar]

> I wonder if he can pay the fine in e-mail promotion services? "c0ur1 dec1s1ons & 1njunct10n5! 100% gu4rant33d!"

I've been on the internet too long

[Megaweapon]

I sort of read that "Fined A$$ Million" ala fined out the ass... *sigh*

Australian spammers

[krell]

A fine for these guys is too easy. They should serve some sort of hard time, like in a prison or penal colony. Or imagine exiling them to a whole continent set aside to imprison them.... Oh wait.

Re:Australian spammers

[aussersterne]

Put them to work in a special prison computer room where they have to filter SPAM out of government email boxes by hand, one click at a time, 10 hours/day. Every time they let a SPAM message through or accidentally can a good message, they get 24 hours in solitary confinement without food. No, make that they get 24 hours in solitary confinement and have to eat nothing but hunks of SPAM for the rest of the week.

They should receive 1 year of time in prison doing this for every 1 year they were SPAMming on the outside.

Re:Australian spammers

[Spacejock]

like in a prison or penal colony

Dude, this is Australia ...

Re:Australian spammers

[1u3hr]

A fine for these guys is too easy. They should serve some sort of hard time, like in a prison or penal colony.

Oh, hilarious. An American making prison colony jokes about Australia. For us, that was 150 years ago. For you, it's Guantanamo Bay.

Hey, here's an idea....

[lottameez]

Can someone please post his email? I'd like to send him some great money saving offers.

Re:NANI?!

[Donniedarkness]

Just in case someone doesn't know, "nani" is Japanese for "what".

And no, your pen15 will never get larger. You're a slashdotter who throws Japanese into sentences at random. It's not even going to matter. Get used to it.

No Jail Time?

[Greyfox]

Spam laws should mandate 1 second of jail time for every spam message sent. That's a half to a third of the time the average spam wastes for me.

Why there are not box stuffing bots?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

These spammers operate on ridiculously low cost for sending mail. Increasing the cost of sending email is neither viable nor desirable. The best option is to increase the cost of benefitting from replies. Only one in a million or two emails produce a prospect for the spammer right now. Just imagine some bots that reply to these spams with bogus phone numbers or credit card numbers. So he now gets 100 or 1000 replies for a million emails he/she is sending out. One or two, at the most, would be real b00bs replying and the rest would be bogus. Now the problem of filtering out bogus replies from real replies is on his end. Just increase the cost just a little. The bogus replies need not be impossible to spot. All we have to do is to increase the cost of processing replies. That will put a dent into spam ops.

If some activists get some action from the credit card companies, phone companies and FBI and set up honeypot phone numbers, bank account, credit card numbers to trap the spammers at the point where they try to cash in, that would be nice.

Re:Why there are not box stuffing bots?

[Hoi Polloi]

Hello, I'm the son of General Nutumbo (retired) of the Nigerian Army. He was very happy to find out that thousands of honest Americans were willing to help him move his $43 million dollar oil renvenues out of the National Bank of Nigeria with their financial help. Now I find out it was all a trick. Shame on you!

Impact on business is less than torrent hosting?

[wonkknows]

So in other slashdot news people get jail time for hosting torrents which impact a limited number of people/business.

Yet, only fines for impacting a HUGE number of people/business??

Re:There's no apostrophe in its when it's possessi

[enigma9]

You are assuming they went to High School in the first place :-)

Re:NANI?!

[Macthorpe]

That's an in-joke in our office after we watched particularly dodgy anime. So, no, I'm not a slashdotter who 'throws Japanese into sentences at random'. I was stuck for a title so I just chucked it on.

Oh, and I'll be sure to relay your pessimism regarding my sexual prospects to my boyfriend.

P.S. Your screen name is paraphrased from a sci-fi film. People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

Summary is in error

[The Famous Brett Wat]

It's WAYNE Mansfield. "Robert" is his middle name. I was one of the people who lodged a complaint and appeared as a witness in the case. The ACMA press release on the matter is a pretty good resource. I have a blog entry on the subject which is short and to the point, and has useful links to other resources (like the ACMA press release).