Porn Spammers Get Five Years Each

PC World is reporting that 'California's Jeffrey Kilbride and James Schaffer of Arizona, have been sentenced to more than five years in federal prison. Both were convicted of conspiracy, money laundering, fraud, and transportation of obscene materials, according to The East Valley Tribune, a newspaper covering the case.' Because sometimes bad things happen to bad people.

Comments

But Does the Punishment Fit the Crime?

[eldavojohn]

Because sometimes bad things happen to bad people. And they should. But 'Does the punishment fit the crime?' is what constantly is asked. Does $220,000 in fines fit downloading 24 songs? The cases involving the internet seem to be outlandish often.

Here are the details for this case that I found another site:

Over nine months in 2004, Kilbride, Schaffer and an associate transmitted more than 600,000 spam messages, according to court documents. They were paid commissions based on the number of people who accessed the websites via the spam. Kilbride and Schaffer tried to make it seem as if they were sending messages from abroad by logging in to servers in Amsterdam. But those messages originated from Phoenix, prosecutors said. They were also ordered to forfeit $1.3m. So for sending 600,000 spam messages, they were each jailed for five years. The money means little to me since they had it from this spamming but the time in prison, I personally believe is a little harsh. I guess that's what the jury should have and did decide although I find myself not agreeing with jurors as of late in many cases involving my field of study.

so how much did they profit?

[jollyreaper]

Harsh sentencing of Kilbride is credited to his attempts to prevent a witness from testifying at the trial. Kilbride received six years in prison and Schaffer received a 5-1/4 year sentence. Each was fined $100,000 and had to forfeit $1.1 million of their porn spam profits. They also had to pay $77,500 in restitution to AOL, which claimed 1.5 million of its customers complained about their spam. TFA says they made $2 mil so it sounds like they'll have around $600k +/-? I'm sure they weren't investing their profits at the time so the figure would more likely be a lot less than that. Sounds like they did not come out ahead in this con. Good.

What really burns me is when someone rips off like $50 million in a white collar crime and the punishment is like 5 years in jail and a $500k fine. Shit, that's a better deal than working a straight job; better retirement, too.

If these guys feel like they got fucked over here, they should consider what it's like being a spammer in Russia. :)

Re:so how much did they profit?

[anagama]

At $600k profit after the fine, that works out to $120k per year in jail. Split between them, that's $60k each per year. Not stellar pay, but not terrible either. Plenty of people would love to make that amount. If they invest their money while in the slammer, they should have a decent chunk when they get out (if they earn 5% per year, about $380k on graduation from prison each).

In other words, I don't know if there is much deterrent value here. To someone making $15k per year at a crumby job, the risk/reward analysis will probably fall into the pro-spamming category. In fact, the whole headline may simply work to attract more spammers, at least those who don't see the "punishment" as being all that harsh, so that we get more than two replacements for the vacancy left by this pair.

Yeah, and it is my fault if you break in to my hou

[SmallFurryCreature]

Yeah, and it is my fault if you break in to my house. Hell, if you shoot me clearly I am to blame for not wearing a bullet proof vest.

What is the color of the sky in your world?

MS can be blaimed for bot nets, it can be blamed for lousy security in general, but stopping spam is NOT their task, do you blaim architect of your house for not including a bulk mail destructor in your mailslot?

Re:Spammers suck!

[Em Adespoton]

Guaranteed this won't make even the most minor dent. 2 guys out of how many? Gee, with odds of about what, a million to one, of being thrown in jail, its actually rational to spam.

IIRC, the current theory is that the majority of spam you get actually comes from around 20 individuals and their botnets. Unfortunately, these guys weren't playing at that level, so shutting them down/imprisoning them probably won't do much to affect the guys outsourcing their stuff to someone controlling US/Korean botnets from a Russian control server.

Should this be encouraged?

[DelitaTheFridge]

Spammers or not, should we really be celebrating the existence of a crime called "transportation of obscene materials"? That seems a little archaic and irrelevant nowadays...

Re:Quoth bash.org: --- nice, really nice

[p0tat03]

Five years is not too much? I say it's not enough. Do you have any idea the kind of computing resources individuals and companies alike have had to dedicate to spam filtering? How much is that costing the worldwide economy annually, or just the USA since this is where the crime "occurred"? How much productivity is lost yearly due to people having to delete these pestering messages from their inboxes? How much is lost when we're forced to tighten our filters and legitimate mail gets lost?

These people have been a blight upon the internet since the day they started spamming, and the collective aggravation and productivity loss they've incurred should net them decades in the nearest penitentiary. This is especially true considering this is neither a crime of passion, nor desperation, and can only be accounted for by greed, which IMHO needs to be punished much more harshly than any other instigator of a crime.

Re:Spammers suck!

[CrashPoint]

Send them to jail for 30 days each time, and you'll see spam dry up as it becomes unprofitable.

After all, it was such a blockbuster success in destroying the drug trade.