High Earning Spammers Face Tougher Sentences

netbuzz writes "More big-time spammers may find themselves doing longer stretches behind bars if a federal judge's first-of-its-kind sentencing decision in a Denver case becomes widely applied. In a sense, these spammers would be hoisted on their own profits, as language in CAN-SPAM allows the use of their profits instead of the difficult-to-measure financial damage they cause in establishing a prison sentence. The Denver spammer earned $250,000 — and a 20% longer prison stint — using this approach."

Comments

"Hoisted on their own profits"

[base3]

is nice, but until they're hoisted on a gallows (or facing a firing squad, in a pinch), it's not quite good enough, but a step in the right general direction. Hang 'em high--after all, they can then say their penis pills caused them to he hung (yeah, hanged, I know, I know).

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[alshithead]

"is nice, but until they're hoisted on a gallows (or facing a firing squad, in a pinch), it's not quite good enough, but a step in the right general direction. Hang 'em high--after all, they can then say their penis pills caused them to he hung (yeah, hanged, I know, I know)."

Yay! Grammar knowledge goodness.

But, I can't agree with them being hanged as an appropriate punishment. Let's save life ending punishment for the truly worst criminals. I'm also not really sure that longer sentences will be a deterrent. Let's put them to work deleting spam flagged by the major ISP's for the rest of their lives. Supervise them appropriately while they are serving their sentence and allow them no other computer access. A swift kick to the ass on a daily basis might make some spam recipients feel better too.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[erroneus]

To me there is no greater crime than the one that involves planning and execution, breaking and skirting security measures, taking advantage of and defrauding thousands if not millions of people, and doing so with a sense of entitlement.

They demonstrate no remorse and no regret. They commit criminal acts on a very wide scale and they somehow think it's business. The crime is executed in a cold, calculating and callous manner against people who often go through great and expensive means to avoid their acts only to have those measures thwarted with ever-increasing intent. INTENT. These guys are intent on doing what they do.

They demonstrate skill that could just as easily be used in honest ways. They choose not to for varieties of reasons, but they clearly have options and ignore the legal ones in favor of illegal ones. Why? Because they stand to make more money criminally? That's the most likely reason.

Now let's compare that to, say, armed robbery. Aside from the true professionals, armed robbers are generally pretty desperate people. Very little planning goes into the act. Get get a weapon and engage in violent and brutal behavior to get money... a relatively small amount of money at that when compared the the criminal described above. The victims are limited in number. The victims aren't usually pulled from a list, but rather someone at random... an unfortunate.

And while an armed robber might present the victim(s) with momentary fright or even injury, it's a much more honest and direct crime. It's also far less planned. The degree is intent is orders of magnitude less than that of the criminal described above. The drive for this crime is generally one of desperation; it's emotional in nature -- passionate. And let's face it. If he had better options, he would be doing that at all.

So really... which one is actually the worst person? Which is the worst crime? Is armed robbery worse because it involves fear?! Someone ran a red light and scared me half to death the other morning! By that measure, a red-light runner is worse than a spammer... and let's not forget that more people die in those types of accidents than from armed robbery, let alone spamming. So REALLY. What makes other crimes worse?

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[Xtravar]

Everyone complains about spammers, but for fuck sake, I get at least two credit card offers a week which I *have* to shred otherwise someone may end up rummaging through my garbage and taking out a credit card in my name. I get shit in my real mailbox that could easily make me miss a bill payment with all the clutter.

Why the fuck does everyone hate on email spammers when they're easily filtered out (for the most part), but they're okay allowing credit card companies and other companies to spam our mailboxes? I hit delete when I see a stock scam, whoop-de-fuckin'-do! But when I get credit card offers and magazines and shit I never asked for in my physical mailbox, I not only have to throw it away, but I have to make sure that no sensitive information is thrown away with it, AND I have to sort out what can be recycled and what can't be (if I feel environmentally conscious).

Beating up on e-spammers is in vogue, and nerds just eat it up and love it. However, physical spam is legal and done continuously with much greater consequences.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[erroneus]

No. Murder is not morally equal. But people are more likely to be murderers than spammers because murder most often involves a momentary lapse of reason or good sense. Spammers are professionally out to get whatever they can, as often as they can at anyone's expense using lies, deceit and misdirection. I find murder to be a lot easier to forgive. Murderers are less likely to have character flaws. Murderers are people like you or your neighbor. They are your boyfriends and girlfriends... husbands and wives... most of the time someone they know is the victim... and often times, there is something resembling deserving or cause!

But the users of the net? The millions if not billions of dollars being spent and/or lost due to spams and scams, security compromises and all the problems caused by spammers. You may idealistically claim to think that no amount of money is worth a single human life, but the facts are not in your favor. If the lives of strangers are so important to you, what are you doing to stop their tragic ends? Trying to stop the war "on terror" are you? I kinda doubt it.

Life and death happens for a variety of reasons and a variety of causes in a variety of ways. Generally speaking, the most pleasant ways to die are those that involve lethal injections or sleeping. Beyond that, the tragedy of death will happen to everyone. It's what's between birth and death that needs to be cared for the most and when a single individual can be responsible for so much expense, trouble and misery spread out evenly across the world. Death is unavoidable. Spam is completely needless.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[SL Baur]

Hmmm. What is "the one that poses a substantial and unavoidable chance of someone getting killed when it all goes south," Alex. Now you're getting into thought crime, which sadly is becoming most fashionable. Justice is getting punished for what you've done wrong, not for what you might have done wrong.

Wrap your head around this: Armed robberies often involve people getting shot and killed. Wrap your head around this: until they are shot and killed, it really doesn't matter. When they are shot and killed, it's murder and we have fairly severe penalties for that.

Armed robbery is taking advantage of the legally disarmed. Put a big sign outside your store (in English and Spanish) - "WARNING: teller is armed" and I'll bet that will be one store that's skipped even by the most desperate wannabe armed robber. Or better still, do like they do in RP and have a uniformed, badged and openly armed security guard at the entrance.

Spam, to the best of my knowledge never killed anyone. I wouldn't be so sure of that. I wouldn't be surprised at all if there were victims of overwork (a fairly common problem in Japan, past PM Obuchi died of it) in Japanese ISPs due to stress and overtime involved with fighting spam. I'd be more surprised though if news of that actually reached a newspaper. And yes, under those circumstances, I would consider it fair to charge spammers with murder.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[KDR_11k]

You can call spam many things but victimless is probably the least applicable. How is it victimless to DDoS mailservers and inboxes while attempting to get data for identity theft? If that was done by a govt it would be considered an act of war.

Which is just the opposite of "regular" justice...

[kclittle]

Steal $15,000, and you get 15 years. Steal $15,000,000,000 (can you say "Enron"?), and you get 2 years plus time spent.
Oh, well, American jurisprudence overcomes all obstacles, I guess.

Suitable punishment

[Scareduck]

Penis enlargement, the hard way, i.e., using a come-along.

Re:Which is just the opposite of "regular" justice

[deniable]

I keep wondering, why do we need to charge the spammers with anti-spam laws. I haven't seen any that aren't drug dealers, stock scams, or outright fraud. Nail the bastards for those with all of the current laws. Funny, the more they made from these, the more counts that can hang them.

If Bob, the neighborhood dealer, was offering as much product as these scumbags, he'd be in jail for life.

Oh well, we have the anti-spam laws now, so we might as well hit them for both.

In a perfect world...

[Anonymous Coward]

In a perfect world spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with too many men who have enlarged their penises, taken Viagra and are looking for a new relationship.

One Solution

[DynaSoar]

"What we need are a few good old-fashioned hangings." -- FTC Commissioner Orson Swindle, at the 2003 FTC Spam Conference.

Re:One Solution

[Rod Beauvex]

Only in America can someone with the last name 'SWINDLE' get appointed to something called the Federal TRADE Commission.

Re:Makes some sense, but not much

[techno-vampire]

Earnings in any mass-mailing campaign (and that's basically what spam is, of course) are provided by the small percentage of people who respond. The more you send out, the more people (assuming a fixed percentage, of course) respond. Therefore, earnings are proportional to the number of messages sent out. In general, it's easier to find out how much a spammer earned than how many spam were sent, so using earnings as a yardstick is quite reasonable.

Re:Prison, really?

[jfengel]

That's the ironic thing about punishment. It doesn't do you any good to punish somebody. It's supposed to be a deterrent, but if the person hasn't been deterred, it costs you more to punish him than to let him go.

But you have to do it anyway, as a message to the next guy that you're serious. The severity of the punishment has zero to do with what this guy did, and everything to do with how strong a message you want to send to the next guy.

In the case of spam, though, deterrence is fruitless. There will always be somebody undeterred, and the economics of spam make that one guy aggravating all out of proportion.

It's why Slashdotters semi-seriously call for much, much harsher punishments. They feel very, very strongly about the message, precisely because they know that it's unlikely to be heard.

Re:Prison, really?

[sqrt(2)]

Punishment does not deter crime. Extreme punishment does not deter extreme crimes. This is one of the most common fallacies I routinely see dragged out when people try and defend the death penalty. The idea that we can somehow make people think twice about the worst crimes, rape and murder, by killing those that we find guilty has been around nearly since the idea of law. It's just as false now as it always has been. We still have crime, we still have the worst crimes. We have more of the worst crimes than countries that do not have the death penalty and have much lighter sentences by comparison. Even our none-death penalty sentences are over the top. Much of the world would consider 25 year and life sentences to be incredibly excessive for the crimes they're applied to here.

When someone is a danger to society, locking them up protects society. Spammers, no matter how annoying are not dangerous to society. Meanwhile, locking them up costs society money. So the best and most effective action that society can take is to fine them. This works especially well for these types of crimes when people are fraudulently making money. Take away all that illegally made money and then some more for our troubles.

Attack the sources of the spam instead.

[miffo.swe]

I really wished the ones using spammers for marketing would be hunted down instead. The spammers are only bricks in the game. If it became a real felony for a company to employ spammers they would find it hard to make any money. Take one spammer away in the US and up pops 10 more in some other country.

That said i really dont think spamming is a felony just as i dont think any other form of marketing should be illegal. Its annoying for sure but the fault lies in our broken emailsystem and with Microsofts crappy security (spammers favourite mailservers are windows boxes). Spam is just symptoms for a bigger issue. Take away the spam and the problem is still there for more nefarious schemes.

So if I steal a quarter...

[SamP2]

And then buy a lottery ticket with it, and win a million, I'd get a much longer sentence than someone else who stole a quarter and didn't make anything out of it?

Sorry, I'm all for canning spammers, but punishing people based on profit they make from ill-gotten gains, rather than the damage they actually caused, seems to be as violating fundemantal principles of justice.