Slashdot Mirror
Spammer Robert Soloway Arrested
Mike writes "Yahoo is reporting that US prosecutors captured Robert Soloway, a prolific Internet marketer responsible so much junk e-mail they called him "Spam King." Soloway was arrested in Seattle, Washington, a week after being indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of identity theft, money laundering, and mail, wire, and e-mail fraud. Soloway is accused of using botnets to disguise where e-mail originated and of forging return addresses of real people or businesses for his mass mailings. If convicted as charged, Soloway will face a maximum sentence of more than 65 years in prison and a fine of 250,000 dollars."
There's plenty of evidence around to nail Soloway for a long, long time.. but to be honest he's not even the worst spammer out there. I suspect the possibility of a plea bargain is quite likely, so that international law enforcement can get to the even bigger fish.
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
I think that sentence for all charges not just spamming: identity theft, money laundering, and mail, wire, and e-mail fraud. So if you add them all up, 65 years is probably right.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
In this case it's about the illegal use of resources - botnets work by hacking PCs and using them to send mail via their Internet connections, which in most countries would be punishable under their equivalent of the UK Wireless Telegraphy Act (actually I think the 2006 revision changed that, but the principle is still there) irrespective of the content in the spam. Also, the vast percentage of spam promotes illegal or semi-illegal products or is a front for scams. Yes, anyone who responds to spam is a fool, but in the end, if they're conned out of anything than a crime has been committed somewhere.
The reason most criminals are never rehabilitated (at least in the U.S.) is because most prisons (especially adult ones) don't even try--because they have lazy "they can't BE rehabilitated" attitudes very much like yours. This is a real tragedy for society too, because 95%+ of the prisoners in any given prison will be coming out one day.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Who? Criminals or spammers? Because your post appears to make no distinction.
Care to explain the difference?
When someone robs the purse of one person, he's a criminal. He made the life of one single person miserable, once.
When someone constantly makes the life of millions of people miserable, he should be at the very least as much a criminal.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
>as spamming is not a crime in the USA
In Washington State it is a civil offense. Statutory damages are $500 per spam sent.
The kicker is you have to either find a judge who knows that, or else is willing to take the time to learn the nuances of the anti-spam law in Washington State. Most judges in Washington State do not believe that spam is a civil offense, even after the relevant statute has been quoted in full in the complaint.
Amber
Wind Beneath Thy Wings
To whoever thinks that 65 years is a bit too much:
Think about time.
Think about the time you spend/spent 1) deleting spam, 2) writing rules to filter spam, 3) learning, writing, installing, configuring bayesian apps.
Add to that the time spent by your POP/IMAP/SMTP/Exchange server to receive spam and forward it to you the one that passed thru the aforementioned filters.
Think about the total time you spent dealing with spam, in one form or another.
Then multiply that time for all the people on Earth that face the same problem as you do - from simple users to ISP admins - and have to think and implement solutions - from "ignore and delete" to complex auto-training systems.
65 years suddenly appear a shard of a split second, compared to the total wasted time.
Spam obviously *annoys* you, so you spend on appropriate countermeasures. Subtraction of, say, a notebook damages you. A knife in your body tends to kill you. The first "damage" is self-inflicted, the other ones are not. So, spam is not theft. By that logic, noisy cars in the road are stealing my time and money, because I choose to install thicker windows.
I have a graphic heavy website (Gallery 1.x based). Most of my traffic is bots crawling the site and leaving comment spam. Just an annoyance? My bandwidth bills have gone up because my traffic has gone up by a factor of five in the last year. I have recently started hitting my quota, and now it costs me extra each month.
Obviously I need to find the time to upgrade the site and use some sort of CAPTCHA to keep the spammers at bay.
You call it an annoyance, but it takes money from my pocket. It's clearly theft and needs to be punished as theft.
"*65* years? That seems way over the top. Why can't laws just reflect some reason in the usa?"
"Reason?" What if I told you that his actions single-handedly required an extra 65 man-years to fix? Certainly not far-fetched: that's about 3 minutes for 10 million people, erasing spam, updating filters, installing firewalls, reinstalling the operating system, and that's before we get into the felonies he's charged with, such as wire fraud. And what about the hours worked by his victims to pay for the new security software they need?
He's easily caused 65 man-years of life to be wasted cleaning up problems he deliberately caused in an effort to profit off of it. What rational reason is there that he himself should not be subjected to the same loss of his finite time on this planet?