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MySpace Wins $230 Million Judgment Against Sanford Wallace
smooth wombat writes "Apparently some people just don't take the hint. The latest story in the Sanford Wallace spamming saga is a $230 million verdict against Wallace and his partner, Walter Rines, when they failed to show up in court.
Wallace and Rines were accused by MySpace of creating their own accounts and taking over other accounts through phishing scams, and then using those accounts to send out bogus emails to other members. The emails sent would indicate a video or web site but when people would go to the link, the two would make money through the number of hits generated or they would try to sell something such as ring tones.
According to MySpace, the pair sent over 730,000 emails to members which resulted in bandwidth and delivery-related costs as well as complaints from hundreds of members. The 2003 CAN-SPAM Act allows MySpace to collect $100 per violation or triple that amount when the spam is sent 'willfully and knowingly.'"
Now all they have to do is find him to serve the order.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
1) Good luck Collecting
... Good
... is this good?
2) Spammers get nailed
3) MySpace wins
Just my initial thoughts.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I hate spammers and MySpace alike, so I'm not sure what to think about this ruling.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
The biggest surprise in the story is totally off-topic... I thought excite.com (the story link) was long dead. I guess it's been reborn as a handy way to wrap ads around Associated Press stories, but I still remember when they were in the running for King of Search. Now, I can't remember why I stopped using them, but the reason probably starts with G.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
They'd have billions or trillions or more.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The key here is that Myspace was able to show that this particular method of spam caused a negative impact. And while I am not a rabid fan of Myspace, I viciously HATE spam. Good luck trying to find the guy, let alone get 230 million from him.
Well, as long as Sanford's brother Marcellus doesn't get convicted, then everything is okay.
This guy's the limit!
Forgot that thing beginning with G? A good place to start looking is http://www.google.com/ , you can find most things there if you remember a few details.
-1 not first post
Important to note here is that nothing was actually tested in court. MySpace won a default judgment because the spammer did not show up. Besides the obvious issues of collecting, that means that they didn't really test anything in court.
-Daniel
Why didn't they force the FBI to nail them on computer crimes relating to fraud and unauthorized access.
You or me wouldn't be able to pressure the FBI to do that, but Myspace and Fox are big enough.
Throw them into federal prison for a few years and maybe they will stop.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
Well, someone has to say it. Spammers serve no social good, and it's a pretty bad species that preys on its own.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The number of $230 million seems a bit high.
Certainly a spammer should have to pay for the traffic he cost and I can see that he should pay a multiple of the money he made from the spamming.
Even some kind of punitive damage seems in order since he willingly impacted another's business for personal gain.
But $230 million seems completely out of whack and unrelated to the damage inflicted. $300 dollars per spam seems excessive when the average return per spam mail probably lies far below $1.
But I guess in times when Facebook is "worth" $15 billion, $230 million is just peanuts.
I think we can all assume that the perpetrators will not be able to pay the $230 million, thus making it partly an empty gesture.
This is "good" and everything, though somewhat meaningless since Wallace and his partner will never be able to pay the sum, but isn't it ironic that a company like MySpace that foists a product that is only a cunt hair different than spam is suing a spammer? MySpace is like OK! Magazine, sure it's a "publication" but it's certainly not "journalism". Likewise, MySpace is just opt-in legal spam.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
http://sanfordwallace.com/wordpress/
"I just read that a court awarded MySpace a $234 million dollar judgment against me. Thatâ(TM)s pretty amazing since I havenâ(TM)t even been served in this case since the preliminary injunction about a year ago. Regardless, the checkâ(TM)s in the mail."
This is not a verdict, it's a default judgment. Verdicts come from juries.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...but they'll never take our FRRRREEEEEED-oh, wait, wrong Wallace. Sorry.
instead of publishing issues relating to 'stuff that (really) matters'. get with it robbIE, it's much later than we pretend it is.
I know I'm in the minority when I say I'm against the CAN-SPAM Act. I'm against it because it's pretty much a waste of time.
Note the contradictory statement FTA:
The judgment is a big victory for MySpace, although service providers often have a tough time collecting such awards.
I'd hazard a guess whatever MySpace collects it's still gonna end up costing them more in attorney fees than they could have spent on a technological solution.
Five years after CAN-SPAM and spam is at an all-time high. CAN-SPAM hasn't even made a dent.
The real problem with CAN-SPAM is that it's an extremely inefficient way of stopping something that could be accomplished more elegantly with technology.
Indeed, the reason my inbox isn't filled with spam is because of real-time black holes and filters, *not* because of CAN-SPAM.
If only the lawyers were programmers.
I know how to make the Superbowl Halftime Show NOT suck. Execute Spamford Wallace on the field.
Don't just execute him. Make a game of it. Bring down the lucky fans who have their seats drawn or something along the lines, and give them lead weighted or steel footballs to throw at him. The one who delivers the death ball (could be the first guy if he's good enough) wins a Chevy truck.
During the world series, have a contest taking out his partner.
Then we need to get the rest of the world involved, I'm sure something could be done with the world cup. The Olympics? Well China has LOTS of spammers in their country, and they have no problem executing criminals either. I could see contest with discus, shot put, and javelins.
Make this the year of spammer carnage, see if we get much spam next year. We wouldn't even have to execute them all, just a few high profile ones at a few events and the others will chicken out. At least in Spamford Wallaces case his will be well earned.
Can you imagine the advertising revenue doing this would generate in the half time show? People would tune in just for the half time show, talk about a win/win situation.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Is Wallace really just trying to earn the title of "biggest single-person *ssh*l* on the Internet?" he's getting ready to look worse than Greg Thompson or Darl McBride these days...
...in bed
In the late 90's, I got pulled into a VP's office, because someone in our building had accessed an "inappropriate" web page during our late night shift in a wafer fab. I pointed out that I don't have access to the area where the offices are (I was a clean room tech back then), and asked if they looked to see who had entered the area with their electronic key. Then I asked what website they had visited. They looked at the stack of papers and said, "Excite.com".. I laughed and asked if they had ever looked at the site. (they hadn't) Maybe thats why I am so deadset against filtering now!
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Spam is of course a complex matter but anyone who wishes to avoid myspace can always install the Firefox extension amionmyspace
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6067
Sadly not yet updated for the latest version of Firefox, but always amusing when you think you clicked on something important that turned out to be an Ivy-Leaguer's spring break pictures of a really stooopid drunken party.
What? No? Happens to me all the time...
You can also eliminate loads of timewasting (ie not on slashdot) and delete your existing web2 social network accounts. In the reason field select "other" and enter "I am leaving the Internet forever". Curiously this will result in lots of real phone calls and messages from the friends you never knew you had, telling you that your Bebo (fill in social website name) account is not working.
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
That's the name that I expected never to see again. What is next, Canter & Siegel?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
That's OK. We all thought Sanford "Spamford" Wallace and Walt "Picklejar" Rines were out of business as of ten years ago. Those two motherfuckers (and I already have lawyers from the Oedipus Complex Anti-Defamation Leage calling on line one for my slur against people who fuck their mothers) have been spamming in one form or another since before excite.com even started. Here's a snapshot of the spam wars, circa 2001. Look
Walt Rines' nickname of Pickle Jar comes from news.admin.net-abuse.email, and he was dubbed thusly by one of the Elder Gods of Spamfighting, the immortal Bill Mattocks. The USENET thread to which I just linked was the one in which what had been widely known for some time was finally proven -- that every time a spammer says he's going to "remove you from his list", he's lying. (Following the FTC hearings, most of the major spammers of the day, including Spamford and Pickle Jar, were touting a "universal remove list" as the solution -- unbeknownst to the spammers, the list was seeded with never-used email addresses, and unsurprisingly, those never-used email addresses immediately started receiving spam.)
Hell, altavista is what pulled me away from excite.com.
Fnord.
Sanford Wallace?
LART That Pinhead!
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
My stance toward spammers is the same as the Army's stance on terrorists: Nuke 'em 'til they glow and then shoot 'em in the dark.
Sanford "Spamford" Wallace and Walter "Pickle Jar" Rines, together again, still spamming.
For some reason this picture just popped into my head.
How is fining spammers going to stop the spam problem? They will just have to send more spam in order to pay the fines. I bet it will take a shit pile of spam to pay this $230 million fine!
Further more, it is BS that I have to sign up for an account on here just to reply on a damn thread!
My reason begins with B... (as in Bankruptcy - I used to work for @Home until they were dragged to their doom by the dual Excite / Blue Mountain boat anchors)
Funny thing is that I can guarantee when Infospace bought the corpse they did at least migrate over not only people's email but all of their custom user/portal settings. Why? I just went back to "excite.com" after I don't know how many years and my personalized greeting still says, "Hello Chapter 11!"
Now if they could just nail Heather with Account Services.
Yoghurt
I would have thought vigilantes had taken him out years ago. It's pretty amazing that he's still breathing; he's a long-time enemy of practically every person on the Internet. And don't tell me there aren't any crazy/violent people on the Internet.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
"What we need are a few good old fashioned hangings." -- FTC Commissioner Orson Swindel; at the 2003 FTC Spam Conference.
"REMAIN CALM" -- Afterburner; professional sysadmin and member of Subgenius Police, Usenet Tactical Units, Mobile (SPUTUM) who provided documented evidence used to sink Spamford and Picklejar's boat last time they got uppity. (Winner of the Golden Mallet award, as was Bill Mattocks).
"There Is No Cabal, and we will KICK ASS." -- Doug Mackall (dec. 1999); Cabal organizer and another Golden Mallet recipient. Through his organizing efforts, about a dozen people took on such as Netcom and Worldcom/UUNet and made them stop spam coming from their customers.
It may take a village to raise a child, but it doesn't take near that many to raze a spammer. Who would you like to LART today?
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I'm reading the CAN-SPAM Act right now, and though I'm not a fan of spam regardless of the source, I'm not sure a MySpace PM, tag, photo comment constitutes an "electronic message" under that law.
SMTP by its nature is VERY vulnerable to abuse (false headers, having to accept and filter from unknown servers, etc.), so a law protecting it is reasonable.
This is similar in concept to fax-spam. Sure, you could build a fax machine that would only accept incoming calls from a "white list," but it would create as many problems as it solves. And, yet, having to accept unknown callers results in the owners of the fax machine wasting resources receiving and processing the spam calls.
However, a "message" between members of a private web site such as MySpace is only as vulnerable as Tom and his minions choose to implement it.
If MySpace doesn't like spam, they should change their system to not encourage it. Unlike SMTP, they control the whole system and can add reasonable protections. Thus, there is no need for a specific law to "protect" them against spammers.
And, in fact, MySpace now has a number of protection options to keep spammers and random strangers away from your message box--protections that your ISP doesn't have for your POEM (plain old e-mail) account.
IMHO, the spammers should be prosecuted criminally for computer intrusion (for phishing accounts), not sued in civil court.
Why did they not even bother to come to court to defend themselves?
Usually netscum put up a vigorous and indignant defense: "Where Are Our First Amendment Rights?", "MySpace violated their ToS by chopping our accounts without due process!" etc. These scumbags didn't even show up!
Was it their complete and utter contempt for the law and justice system, or did it perhaps have something to do with an angry mob outside the courthouse?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
Before UNH caught on, the school's entire email directory was publicly accessible. Obviously the work of Wallace, there were a bunch of spam emails poorly disguised to look like some girl's conversation about the club that she mistakenly forwarded to the whole school.
...isn't that what we call it when someone doesn't show up for court?
Well, now at least we *sorta* have something to balance out e390 v. Spamhaus
Take that, Ayn Rand! Audacity is not always a virtue, but often a moral weakness.
Isn't all spam sent "willfully and knowingly"? I just figured that was included in the definition of spam.
Most sane people agree that G.W. Bush is much more of a monkey than Obama is.
Ok, so I've been thinking on whether or not we really have free will. Granted we can choose to do this or that, but one can argue that at the end of they day, all
I would have expected "hotmail" to raise more eyebrows
Friend or foe? This could get really interesting. Is it possible for a spammer to hurt myspace enough you'd pardon him for spamming? Is it possible for myspace to hurt spammers enough that you don't mind that it's myspace who's doing it? Personally I think spammers hurt society in general and me in particular more than any one website could and am curious what your situation might be that you've got such a vendetta against myspace.
I think they should have put it in the how-sweet-it-is department, not the i-thought-that-guy-was-done department. That should be a special circle of Hades reserved for the Darl McBride guy formerly over at the former SCO.
On the news itself, wonderful. However, it's not enough to go after the big fish. We need to destroy the little spammers, too. Basically, the spammer sends out 100 or 1,000 spams hoping to find one sucker--but I think we could really hurt the spammers if we made it really easy for any of the first 99 non-suckers to slam the money window in the spammer's face before the sucker can even try to throw money through it. Here is my currently pending suggestion on how to do that:
How to make Gmail the spam target of absolute last resort.
The goal of this suggestion is to intelligently leverage and focus Google's expertise and credibility against the spammers and their accomplices. But where will the intelligence come from? From me, from you, from *ANYONE* who has a Gmail account and who wants to help oppose the annoying evil that is spam. Aggressively implemented, it could make Gmail into Spammer Heck--maybe to the point where only a fool would send spam to Gmail. (Yeah, there are plenty of fool spammers--but at least we'd get the laughs without the serious spammers.) Less spam = more value in Gmail.
So do you want to fight against spam? You, too, could become a WSF (wannabee spam fighter).
SpamSlam is my 'working draft' label. The idea is roughly based on other anti-spam systems--but with more smarts. Almost all email systems include one level of feedback in a Spam/NotSpam button. (For relative brevity and because it simplifies the draft implementation, I'm focusing on Web-based email here.) Think of SpamSlam as a report-spam-button on steroids. SpamSlam would report the spam, but also do much more. Essentially this Gmail feature would do some of the automatic analysis that any spam fighter has to do, get some intelligent feedback, and hopefully be able to act immediately against the spammer. Speed of action is actually crucial--cutting off the spammers' income is a key goal of this proposal.
Here is an approach to implementing it:
Clicking on SpamSlam would first trigger a low-cost automatic analysis of the email, including the headers. Let's call this Pass 0. Basically this is just using regular expressions to find things like email addresses, URLs, and phone numbers. The results would be used to generate a Pass 0 webform with comments and options (and explanations and links). This pass should also look for obfuscation and ask the wannabe spam fighter (WSF) to help break the spammers' attempts to evade the spam filters. (This is leveraging the spam's features against the spam--if a human can't figure out the spam, then the human can't send money to the spammer.) In many cases, this Pass 0 analysis may be able to suggest answers. If something like "drop@dead.com" appears in the header, then the WSF should just click the option 'fake email'. Perhaps the WSF would only need to click a check box to confirm that "V/1/A/6/R/A" is a drug and categorize the spam. Other times the WSF can actually type in the answer to the spammer's quasi-CAPTCHA, and then the SpamSlam function can do something. At the bottom of the 'exploded email' in Pass 0, there will be the usual submit button.
After the WSF submits that Pass 0 form, more analysis can begin. The data is no longer raw, but partly analyzed, and the system can start checking domains, registrars, relays, fancier types of header forgery, MX records, categories of crime, email routings, and even things like countries hosting the spammer. This kind of analysis will probably take a bit of time, but a new Pass 1 form will be prepared for the WSF to consider. Basically, this would mostly be a confirmation step for the obvious counteractions. That's stuff like complaining to identified senders and webhosts, but also things like reporting open relays and spambots. It also needs more flexibility and 'other' options in t
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
$230 million is so ridiculously high that he knows he'll never have to pay a cent and he and other spammers alike will continue. If the amount was even remotely conceivable to pay, like $1 million dollars, then he wouldn't so easily be able to go bankrupt.
Think about the evolution of spammers...The door to door salesman selling knives along with Jehovah witnesses, then junk paper mail, tv ads and now spam mail as we know it! It just gets worse and worse until one day your sitting at your pc enjoying the next google search engine and all of a sudden a spam pop up box pops directly into your mind and your left banging your head on your keyboard to rid of it...just wait:-)
I didn't.
He moved to spyware and got caught by the feds back in 2004. I don't believe he's ever left the spam business, he's just expanded into other bullshiat and started working a bit more at hiding.
He'll spam until he dies or they throw him in prison.
I started using Excite after I saw the sign on their building in 1996 in the valley. I heard that story too so I'm sure it has happened more than once. Who's wafer fab did you work in? I worked for ICBD (a division of a large company) at the time designing ASICs but our fabs were not in the bay area. Once excite sold out and started placing annoying ads I quit using it. Then I had a roomate who was in the stanford phd program who pointed me to google in the late 90s when I complained about excite to him. I still have the original account on excite though.
Just set me up a basic sig... 10 PRINT "Gordon Aplin" : GOTO 10