MySpace Sues Spam King

Harry Maugans writes to mention a lawsuit filed by MySpace against Scott Richter, the 'Spam King'. Filed under California's harsh anti-spam laws, the suit alleges that Richter sent millions of unsolicited 'bulletins' to MySpace users over the past few years. From the article: "The suit is aiming for monetary damages and an injunction that would permanently ban Richter and his affiliates from MySpace. The amount of money sought by MySpace has not been disclosed. Richter was already ordered to pay $7 million in a 2003 lawsuit filed by Microsoft after initially refusing to settle the dispute for $100,000. Microsoft announced in 2005 that it would be using the money from the settlement to fuel further antispam operations."

Comments

Unfortunatly it is the only way to go.

[jellomizer]

The only way to stop spam is to make it unprofitable. So if you get enough lawsuits on you Spams become unprofitable. Thus it stops.

Re:Unfortunatly it is the only way to go.

[jackharrer]

Or we will have a lot of small spammers that will be quite hard to track and sue. It's easy to find somebody like Richter, with big company and proven track of shadowy activities.

To make spam stop is to educate people not to buy crap they advertise.

Re:Unfortunatly it is the only way to go.

[Rob T Firefly]

No it doesn't. They'll just take it offshore, do a better job of hiding, or otherwise make it difficult or impossible to sue them. The only reason this guy is known as any sort of a "spam king" is they were able to catch him, but he is one among how many thousands of spammers worldwide?

Re:Unfortunatly it is the only way to go.

[jellomizer]

And how will you do that. Spammers get the stupidest of the supid people. Any education attempt will not effect the stupid people thus crap over spam will still be sent. At least Lawsuits against spammers espectilly high profile ones, allows the "Honest" Spammers to pause and rethink the cost of doing business.

There are actually differnt levels of spammings.

Level one. People have a legit product/service to sell, they were gullible enough to beleave spamming works well and it is legal and just like any other form of marketing.

Level two. They still have a legit product/service, they know it it could have a negitive back lash and there are some legality issues what are not 100% clear but they figure the Benefit is worth the Risk.

Level three. They have a Questionable product/service and want to buisnes anonmymously with legal forms of advertising out Spaming is the only alternitive form.

Now with high legalsuits the Level one and Level twos Spammers will rethink thier options with spamming. Level 3 will still be there but it will reduce the Legit qualitys of Spam even further making each lawsuit more and more easy to convict spammers.

Re:Unfortunatly it is the only way to go.

[Tom]

200 Known Spam Operations responsible for 80% of your spam.

Re:Unfortunatly it is the only way to go.

[Anonymous Coward]

To make spam stop is to educate people not to buy crap they advertise.

Go after the so-called legit companies that Spam their own customers and allow individuals to sue under CAN-SPAM (or simply get that law off the books so we can seek civil action without corps using CAN-SPAM as a shield).

Technology types promote spam by letting big companies abuse personal information, misrepresent privacy policies ("we value your privacy... read on to see how we value your privacy by selling your info to anyone"), or requiring password/personal info to unsubscribe - a technique identical to phishing.

Educate the user - puh leeze. Petty spammers are following the same formula the corporation use. There is little techincal difference between spamming from a zombie or open relay versus using a corporate "no reply" email address. Any fucker that sends me email better be prepared to individually respond to replies.

Predicatably, this line of thought gets a negative reaction here. It seems many of you get paid as cogs in the marketing machine. Your only problem is a technical one: the *VOLUME* of Spam. If you can't stop a MAJOR credit card company ("I'm sorry sir, we have no control over that as a third party handles all our... " - Harris Bank I'm looking at you!), then you have no chance of stopping the scammers.

Re:Unfortunatly it is the only way to go.

[swordgeek]

This was an old and flawed argument in 1993.
AOL pays the postal services to deliver their crap. Spammers make the recipient pay for their crap.
If it weren't for AOL and junk mail in general, you would pay MORE for your postal service. If it weren't for Scott Richter and the like, you would pay LESS for your internet service. (and it would be significantly better as well.)

One of my customers is a moderately large company, with about 4000 employees. They have spent about a quarter million dollars on anti-spam software and hardware, which doesn't include the cost of bandwidth, storage, man-hours, or lost productivity.

Re:Unfortunatly it is the only way to go.

[modecx]

And how will you do that. Spammers get the stupidest of the supid people. Any education attempt will not effect the stupid people thus crap over spam will still be sent.

I suggest we spam these stupid people with messages urging them not to buy things from spam messages, or else someone's gonna hunt them down and kill their pets and/or livestock.

Same thing for the assholes who drive whilst on the phone.

Banned?

[Rob T Firefly]

an injunction that would permanently ban Richter and his affiliates from MySpace.

For those unfamiliar with Myspace, it's that thing that a 13-year-old child can easily get a new account on after being banned. Good thing this guy isn't a 13-year-old child!

Re:IANAL

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right! I bet they didn't think of that when they were drafting the law. Man, you've got 'em on a technicality.

Or, you probably havn't.

Your idea won't work.

[paladinwannabe2]

Your post advocates a
( ) technical (*) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(*) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(*) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(*) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(*) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(*) Asshats
(*) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(*) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
(*) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(*) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(*) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(*) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(*) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

Thanks to Cory Doctorow for his excellent form post.

Re:Your idea won't work.

[esme]

Your post advocates a
( ) technical (*) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

Actually, it was a judicial solution

(*) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money

They already know where this guy lives, and M$ is apparently collecting money from him.

(*) Requires too much cooperation from spammers

Not really, since our courts already have wonderful ways of dealing with uncooperatives.

(*) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email

Not sure how this applies.... You sue each individual spammer, so no central authority is needed.

(*) Open relays in foreign countries

Foreign countries with different laws (or standards of justice) could be problems. But in reality, most spam comes from two or three dozen operations, and most of them are in the US or Europe. So the legal problems are not as complicated as you might think.

(*) Asshats
(*) Jurisdictional problems

Ibid.

(*) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes

This solution specifically avoids this problem -- by removing the source of spam rather than trying to stop it technically.

(*) Joe jobs and/or identity theft

Again, our courts have good safeguards for this.

(*) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves

Ibid.

(*) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical

The laws have only been in place for a couple of years. And the big spam-victims have started to use them. We'll see how effective they are.

(*) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem

How is this a feel-good measure? People are actually suing the spammers right now. He's saying we should do more of that (which I'm sure the major spam victims are working on as we speak).

(*) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.

Maybe not. Maybe we'll take down the big spammers only to find out that a bunch of little spammers from Indonesia take their place. But it certainly seems worth a shot, particularly if we can get large amounts of money back from the spammer assholes.

-Esme

Wait for people to stop being idiots...

[Per Abrahamsen]

If that is really the best plan to combat spam, all hope is lost.

Re:IANAL

[Mr. Slippery]

Are bulletins considered emails? I would say no.

Given the way the law is written, the relevant question is not "are bulletins e-mail", but whether a bulletin is "an electronic message that is sent to an e-mail address and transmitted between two or more telecommunications devices, computers, or electronic devices capable of receiving electronic messages".

The interesting thing is that Myspace uses e-mail addresses as login ids. I suppose they will argue that any message to a Myspace user is therefore "sent to an e-mail address" even though it is not sent via SMTP.

Bulletins may not be email

[Per Abrahamsen]

But send enough of them, and they are definitely considered spam.

I'd be surprised if the California anti-spam laws were formulated in terms of emails, rather then "electronic messages" or something similar.

Both Work and Will Required

[bill_mcgonigle]

No it doesn't. They'll just take it offshore, do a better job of hiding, or otherwise make it difficult or impossible to sue them.

In a world where:

people only accept mail signed with domainkeys
AND
law enforcement does its job WRT spammers
AND
machines don't accept connections from jurisdictions that don't have or don't enforce their anti-spam or computer trespass laws

then we stand a reasonable chance of tackling spam. Somebody wake me when that world arrives.

Yeah, yeah, balkanization, blah, blah, blah - there are either legal regimes or it's every-man-for-himself. I know how that's working out for folks I know.

Sigh...

[paladinwannabe2]

Fist, Judicial solutions are Law-based, i.e. legislative.
The real problem is tracing the idiots who send the spam- while we can sue the pants off the few people we can find, we can't find everyone. Also, we have very limited jurisdiction over most of the world- we may be able to identify some Spammer's IP, but we need cooperation with the authorities to do anything about it.
Basically, sueing spammers works great when they are in the U.S. and identifable, but that is not going to stop Spam. Obviously we should sue the buggers we can find- but thinking that will solve the problem is far too optimistic.