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Spammers Fined A$5.5 million

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the that's-a-lot-of-canned-pork dept.

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."

8 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. Is it enough? by jmagar.com · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

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    www.jmagar.com
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    1. Re:Is it enough? by AoT · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      A blog about stuff.
    2. Re:Is it enough? by uwnav · · Score: 4, Funny

      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

  2. Coming up next... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  3. The gavel falls by Dekortage · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?

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    $nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
    1. Re:The gavel falls by Arancaytar · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  4. Australian spammers by krell · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

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    Where were you when the voynix came?
    1. Re:Australian spammers by aussersterne · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

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      STOP . AMERICA . NOW