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"Spam King" Pleads Guilty in U.S. Federal Court
Monty writes "It looks like 'Spam King' Adam Vitale has finally plead guilty to violation of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 in federal court in New York City. 'The indictment said that in less than a week in August 2005, Vitale and Moeller sent e-mails on behalf of the informant to more than 1,277,000 addresses of subscribers at AOL, the online division of Time Warner Inc. Vitale will be sentenced on September 13 when he faces a maximum sentence of 11 years in prison. Moeller, who lives in New Jersey, faces the same charge.' We discussed Vitale's arrest back in February."
So he was guilty. Given the amount of money he amassed spamming, my guess would be he gets 1 year at most and then some probation. Money makes the judicial system go round in this country.
"...he faces a maximum sentence of 11 years in prison."
He may want to ask for more years and just stay in - If I run into him on the street...well, let's just say he will need more than self-healing plastic skin to hold him together until he can be put out of his misery by Kevorkian.
CAN-SPAM Act: 1
Spammers: 1,305,931,426,569
1,277,000 addresses of subscribers at AOL ... faces a maximum sentence of 11 years in prison
Maximum of five minutes in prison for each of the people he spammed. Seems a little light.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
There sure are a lot of guys who get the title Spam King. Can't we get more creative with these titles? Spam Lord. Spam Queen. Spam Prime Minister. Spam Court Jester. I'd prefer more Batman-style evil nemesis names like "The Green Viagra" or something.
I mean, who votes for these Kings? I didn't vote for him!
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
He should be sent to Russia, there he would find justice like Vardan Kushnir
I'm sending care packages to all of his fellow inmates... bottles and bottles of penis enlargement pills.
I'll send one to him as well, but the penis enlargement pill bottles will be emptied and refilled with breast enlargement pills, instead.
I know, I know... they don't work... but I can dream can't I?
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Why would we jail someone for spamming? They are non-violent offenders. Now, after forcing us to waste our time dealing with spam, we get the additional opportunity to pay for his housing for up to 11 years. I think we should place non-violent offenders under house arrest and have them work to undo the damage they did. Maybe have him spend several years identifying spam or doing community service.
This jailing of people for computer crimes that did not cause physical injury and do not present a continuing danger is ridiculous. Take the money they made illegally away and then have them do something to make it up to the community while on probation. Now, if they make a second attempt and get convicted again at whatever they were convicted of originally... then let's reestablish public gallows and hang them, then mount their head on a spike somewhere preferably near a webcam. The point is, either way, they don't go to prison and we save money.
In serious, this whole idea of throwing people in jail for things they did on a computer (including copyright violations) that didn't result in someone being bodily harmed or killed is totally out of proportion and a short-sighted way of dealing with the problem. You can beat the living crap out of someone, enough to give them some minor form of permanent disability for the rest of their life, and get a year in most states - and that's the maximum, which will only be applied if you are a chronic repeat offender.
Anyone who has ever had to swap a hard-drive out of a mailserver due to increased wear or disk space requirements, or upgrade a data pipe to the next size up, has been financially harmed by spammers. And if you slipped with the screwdriver and injured yourself while undertaking this otherwise unnecessary work.... It is not the victimless crime that supporters of spam like to make out.
That deserves to be punished.
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
Fine, he goes to jail. But in the meantime, he's probably sold millions of e-mail addresses to other spammers, because people trusted CAN-SPAM and clicked on the "unsubscribe" link.
The problem with CAN-SPAM is that it's a reactive measure. While allowing spammers to collect your e-mail addresses, the government is feeding the beast they're supposed to kill in the first place.
Or perhaps the collective time of the people involved to filter out the incoming junk. I see at least 1000 per month caught by my filter. A filter that _used_ to be entirely unnecessary.
Having an active email account on the internet, almost guarantees getting spammed. OK, so I can tidy it, delete it or otherwise remove it. Much like I can pick up the empty beer cans that someone has decided to drop in my garden. This doesn't mean I appreciate it in the slightest.
This spamking has made a very larger sum of money indeed, by some seriously antisocial behaviour.
have I missed something here
Yes.
It's not like he's committed a violent crime or put people out of work.
This plague costs the economy billions in lost productivity, otherwise unecessary system capacity expenses... do you REALLY think that a company looking to grow and compete and hire/retain the best people at whatever they do wouldn't rather spend all of that time and energy on things directly relevent to what they DO for a living? Huge expenses - otherwise unrelated to a business's actual line of work - absolutely DO cost jobs. How many schools could better spend that money on lower tuitions or newer labs? Just think it through.
But wouldn't a far more appropriate response be to seize his assets and slap him with fines amounting to the damage he's caused?
The damage he's caused involves WAY more money than what he's collected. That he's willing to cause that sort of damage should tell you everything you need to know about the guy. He wants someone else's money, and is willing to cause damage and participate in fraud to get it. It's not very different than committing insurance fraud for cash... and then watching the rest of us pay higher premiums to cover it.
More to the point, though: he's already demonstrated a willingness to knowingly break the law and abuse other people's systems and networks. Physically stopping him from doing it again by locking him up is the only way you'll prevent him from just putting on another hat/identity and doing it again, more carefully, through a surrogate. Or "consulting" for someone else who does. What do you think he'll do at night after he clocks out of the community service work you'd rather he was doing? Hopping online somewhere, or talking someone else through doing so, and doing something he knows will generate some cash.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Hah! He'll be in the cell next to Paris Hilton because it's currently seen as a "victimless" crime. What they don't realize is the wide reaching impact that this has. Most people in the country work for small to medium sized businesses. These are the employers that are hardest hit by this. Email infrastructures are melting down under the load. This means that companies are spending dollars on deploying spam filtering software, hardware, more bandwidth, etc. to deal with the problems. This is money that could be better used to hire employees, pursue R&D, improve their facility, etc. In the long run it siphons resources away from the rest of the operating budget. It's like a leech or a tapeworm.
2 cents,
QueenB.
HDGary secures my bank
That was not informative.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Say I fraud you out of your entire life savings. I haven't physically harmed you either, but your life is totally devastated... What should be the punishment for that - 6 months? Do you know how many millions of dollars Spammers waste every year just by doing their "relatively innocuous" crimes? I'm not saying we should hang him or anything, but to me 10 years doesn't seem excessive for a white collar crime of this magnitude. I would offer him a deal though - stay offline for 10 years and only do a year in prison. If caught online for any purpose, back to the federal prison for 20 years...
If judges keep letting Spammers get off light, without ever setting a heavy-handed precedent, why would they ever even consider stopping the SPAM?? Sometimes a little scare is good.
"But this one goes to 11!"