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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."
I can't decide, what do people think, 65 years is basically a life sentence. Is that excessive?
Rehabilitate him, you say. Is he ill? Is he handicapped? Is he being manipulated? No. He made his choices and got caught. Now it's *retribution time*. Yeah, revenge. Criminals commit crimes deliberately, I don't see why we should assume that they are somehow to be "saved", saved by what I ask? Their own decisions? I lead a somewhat free life just like they do, they have always had a choice, they chose to commit crimes, and now they get caught and suddenly it's "think of the criminals" time? No way. Rehabilitation works for people who *care* about social acceptance. This kind of people obviously do not care.
However I believe that spamming should not be a crime. In the grand scheme of things... robbing someone is much worse.
Global warming is a cube.
*65* years? That seems way over the top. Why can't laws just reflect some reason in the usa?
Yes, sure...he did more then just spam. But even murderers often come off with less then 65 years, so is spam, impersonating people, using botnets, etc. *really* worse than murdering people?
People should get a grip.
I'm all for laws against spam and all the rest of it, but hell, 5 years + a considerable fine is more than enough.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
There are more issues here than rehabilitating the spammer. The world needs to know that the US is serious about stopping spam, and a serious sentence will be required as a deterrent. 65 years seems excessive, but this guy needs to do some real time, if not for himself, but to stop others who would follow in his path.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
Yeah, and while you're at it, why don't you arrest all linux developers since all that spam probably passed through servers running linux. THE COMPUTER/SOFTWARE/NETWORK IS A TOOL!!! Would you blame General Motors for Paris Hilton driving around drunk because they make it too easy for someone to start a car while intoxicated?
Every single person here has been affected by this guy - some more than others, but all negatively. This is not the time to turn the other cheek, because every time you deleted one of his emails, you were doing just that.
Now is the time for him to get the short/pointy end of the stick...the stick that he sharpened and used on all of us. He took time away from each of us that we will never get back. Talking about fair this or fair that in terms of years behind bars....are you serious? Wake up. This guy leached your life and given the opportunity, he would not hesitate to do it again.
It is only fair to take his time away from him until he has no more.
I hate spam as much as the next guy. That being said, 65 years in jail and a quarter million in fines (even assuming he gets half of that) is just too much. This is the sort of sentence you should impose on murderers, not electronic irritants who use a system designed specifically to allow anyone to said pretty much anything to whoever they please. In short: hurt him, but not too much.
Why bother.
Bad analogy time (hey, this is Slashdot, after all...) - he's not breaking into your house and stealing all the electrical goods to sell at the local pawn shop. Instead, he's breaking into every single house in the whole neighbourhood while the owners are away at work, and using all the bedrooms to run his own private brothel, and then leaving the owners to clean up the mess.
Maybe his actions sit somewhere between robbery and fraud, but either way they are still most definitely criminal IMHO. Simply spamming (in the literal meaning of the word - "sending unsolicited email") should be a misdemeanor depending entirely on the volume of spam sent, and whether any of the email headers are fraudulent. Bot-farming, however, should be a felony.
Holy Crap you're a bleeding heart pussy!!!
Rehabilitation works only if there's remorse for a crime. The only thing he is aware of is the $$$ he makes. If he had to delete 20 billion spam then he might start getting a clue of just how much of a pain in the ass he is for doing his business the way he has. I would go further in that he should also be held accountable for the format/install of all those owned machines out there. And on top of that he's probably also responsible for a lot of people buying new computers under the false impression that they need to get a new one because the old one is slow. It's only slow because of his doings.
I have no interest in rehabilitation unless someone actually shows a sense of regret and remorse for their crimes. And even then there's a question of being real or just playing the therapists.
I do hope that if he's convicted that they have the sense to toss everything they have at him.
Spamming is effectively robbing people of little bits of time and other resources, so it's kind of like stealing but spread over millions of people instead of a single victim.
In this world nothing is certain but death, taxes and flawed car analogies.
If I had mod points today I would give them to you...
spam will never go away, it's a multi billion dollar industry and people actually buy this stuff. So there's a very strong business case to keep it around. Capitalism...
The process of sending unsolicited email may or may not be something you can criminalize if the sender is accurately representing themselves in the email. However, the process of not removing someone from a mailing list upon their request can be considered harassment. I don't know if harassment is a misdemeanor or a felony. Probably depends on the degree. I'll assume for now it is not a felony.
But doing this under snake oil pretenses is a criminal intent. You hide your true identify by forge mail headers and trespassing onto other peoples computers.
The forgery should be treated as just exactly that -- forgery. I think this is considered a felony.
The invasion of someone elses computer should be treated as breaking and entering or theft. The economic value of the theft should be calculated on the cost of the machine being stolen. This would push most actions out of small claims/misdemeanors into felony court. So this too is a felony.
So there you have it, based on previously existing law. Spam is legal if accurately represented. Continuing to send Spam is a misdemeanor. Sending spam as a misrepresentation of yourself or through resources you do not have permission to use, is a felony. Is that so hard to work with?
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.
Global warming is a cube.
But there are more evil crimes than this one and we are shouting and throwing rocks to only these ones.Imo the autorities have the strenght to stop spam if they want to but how will they send their so called "newsletters". Spamming is bad but 65 years seams way to high.
And more importantly, we should ask ourselves: What is the purpose of spam? It's to separate people from their money (either by selling something, by identity theft, or by fraud). Identity theft is actually worse than a one-time robbery. Fraud would be the same as robbing someone. The only case that couldn't be consider the same as or worse than robbery is the marketing of a legitimate item. Unfortunately, if you look at the techniques used by spammers to bypass spam filters and those market their wares on people who are clearly not interested, you have to assume that the product they are marketing is not worth a dime. In my book, tricking someone into buying something that isn't worth the money is the same as robbery. And for the spammer, it's not just one robbery. It's robbing everybody who "bites" the hook.
Consider the fact that the spammer *knows* that it's a crime (otherwise there would be little attempt to hide the origin of email). The spammer *knows* that almost nobody on his list wants to receive the email (otherwise there would be no need to use a botnet to bypass spam filters). The spammer *knows* (or ought to know) that it's illegal to compromise somebody's computer and use it against their will. So you have here a person who knows that it's illegal and socially unacceptable to do what they are doing, and that there will be severe punishment if they get caught. Yet despite the fact that they could count their winnings and move on, they continue to follow the path of a criminal.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
This maybe off topic but I think there is something seriously wrong in the US with the punishment they give to prisonners, :P (I meant that for Paris Hilton by the way)
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I mean, you get arrested for DUI(crime in which you put other lives at risk and you get a 23 days sentence) but for a non-violent, non-life threatning crime such and identity theft and spamming(the action of sending lots of emails(GOTO 10, you know, can't live without it)) you get 65 years + a fine.
Some law makers aren't thinking. On that note, I wish to recommend a more appropriate sentence : 65 years of first line tech support
-Hi, you have reached comcast tech support, my name is Paris, how can I help you?
-Hi m'am, the internet no work no more.
-OMG, what are we gonna do, like OMG, I'm so hot but people aren't gonna know no more z'OMG
well, I don't lose sleep at night worrying about spam. Yes, it's an annoyance. But is it on the level of rape and murder? No.
shit like this is why we have a huge prison population. there ARE other means of punishing this guy than locking him up for life (which I doubt will happen anyway). sentence him to work on antispam measures, sentence him to be a teacher in an inner city school, make him work it off.
Y'know, I'm all for rehab - but I agree with parent poster, I don't see the point for white-collar financial crimes. You want to rehabilitate the Enron fuckups? Spammers? It's not like they were born in a gang-violence dominated neighborhood with massive social obstacles to overcome and make ends meet and need job training, these are well-educated, well-supported "members" of society who are making money hand over foot at the cost of millions of others. I think a bit of punishment[1] is in order, and then probation - like never being able to touch a computer again. Hell, he can become a computer security consultant to anti-spam companies and make millions again, as long as he stops spamming.
[1] I predict we'll see a drop off in pen1s 3nlargement!!1! emails after he spends some time in the prison showers...
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
If sending unsolicited mail to someone is illegal, then the Government's monopoly on first class postal services (aka the US Post Office) should be indicted immediately !! So typical for government prosecutors to go after a guy making a living because what he does is unpopular, yet they reserve the right to fill my mail box full with totally worthless and unwanted (paper wasting as well) real world spam. If the State can't get its own house in order they got no business going after private citizens for the same crime they commit on a daily basis all over American. Oh wait i forget the laws don't apply to politicians or government sacred cows like the Post Office, just you and me, and innovative young men who fulfill a service that is evidently quite in demand and a very profitable business. Now if he has committed some kind of genuine fraud well then fine, he should go to jail for it, but if all this guy has done is send e-mail to people who did not "opt in" well tell me how i can Opt-out of the government monopoly mail service that keeps taking up so much room in my trash can ?
Spam is tresspassing, fraud (on several different levels), theft, among other things.
This bozo has been spamming millions of messages a day, every day, for several years.
Sure, you could argue he's done nothing worse than maybe stealing a penny here, a penny there. However millions of pennies quickly adds up to several tens of thousands of dollars.
That doesn't include the countless hours people have spent manually deleting any spam that makes it through whatever filtering system they're using, the cost of the filter itself (some corps have easily spent $100k+ on their email filtering hardware/software)
Furthermore, it's not as if this bozo doesn't know his garbage is unwanted. Why else would he, and the other scum like him, spend so much time devising ways to defeat the filters and get his ads through? Hash busters, image-spam, haywyre encoded javascript, are just a few techniques that were clearly developed to slip through the filters and into users' email boxes.
65 years? Sounds about right to me. Knowing our screwy legal system, he'll probably end up barely spending 1 year in prison due to good behavior anyways.
Lack of countermeasures does not imply permission.
Do you have bars on your windows? No? Then it must be OK for me to break into your house. After all, I'm not commiting a crime here, otherwise you would have put appropriate countermeasures in place, right?
Oh, and excessive noise IS considered a crime. Don't believe me? Invite your local death metal band over to your place for an unbridled jam session at 3am, and see what your neighbors do. Well, it IS their fault after all. They could have installed better sound proofing on their houses, right?
Yeah...spoken like a true spammer.
Like the 'real' sentences have stopped drug use and abuse as well as trafficking?
The US imprisons more people than the vast majority of the world's countries.
Nevermind the fact that it can cost us more to imprison someone than the monetary value of the damage he did.
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That's not the best argument. I'm a technology-oriented person and am in very good shape. In fact, I'm a state boxing champ. So not all nerds are pasty, 98-pound weaklings.
Second, there is probably tremendous profit potential in dealing in spam. If there weren't, people like this wouldn't do it. What's six months or a few uncomfortable years in prison if you come out rich, and with rights to the TV movie and book?
Finally, you get someone who's already a criminal, and a pretty smart one at that, and throw him in the general population with other criminals. What do you think they're going to talk about there while he festers? Probably one of two things: Jesus or crime, and more probably talk about crime. Prison is like crime college featuring taxpayer-paid tuition, room and board.
Prison should be reserved for those who are out to physically harm others and cannot be loose. We should use community service and other society-beneficial practices to punish and rehabilitate those that commit nonviolent crimes.
Message contains 1 attachment: spam.gif
it doesn't matter because it is split between millions of people.
So, is insurance fraud OK with you, too? I mean, the money is stolen from all the policy holders, so if someone steals a million bucks then each person affected only pays a buck, right?
The idea that a crime is diminished because it affects millions of people is asinine.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."