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."
Here are some fuzzy numbers from google / wiki.
1) He was sending 20 million emails over 15 days. Let's call that 1 million emails per day.
2) He was doing this since 2003. Let's call that 3 years.
3) 3 Years * 365 Days * 1 million emails per day is 1,095,000,000 emails.
4) Some spam emails are obvious and some are not. Lets say it takes you, on average, 5 seconds additional time to detect and delete a spam email. That's 5,475,000,000 seconds he has cost people.
5) 60 seconds, 60 minutes, 24 hours, 365.25 days = 173 years.
6) That doesn't include cpu cycles waisted or law enforcement costs. That's 2+ lifetimes. *just in wasted time*.
Even if I am off by an order of magnitude. I'm ok with years of prison. (I'm also ok with higher penalties for drunk driving, but that's another story.)
"Long time listener, first time caller."