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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.
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.
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
"I hate spammers and MySpace alike, so I'm not sure what to think about this ruling."
Don't worry, with only 730k mails, those guy probably made at most 5 grands, so there won't be much to collect, probably not enough to cover MySpace's fees. But the message is "get caught spamming and we'll make sure you'll have to file for bankrupcy", which is good because most of these guys are only interested in easy cash, so they'll think twice before risking their house.
Spammers, however, reach out and touch me in ways I don't like to be touched. Kill 'em with fire.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
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.
In this case it isn't about damage infliced it's about punishment. Imagine if the neighbor kid threw a rock through your window once a week, but every week his parents sent a check for twice the amount the window cost to replace. Surely you wouldn't care if the kid kept doing it; after all, it's not costing you anything.
Punative damages are designed to be excisive to prevent occurances in the first place. To be fair they got off light, the maximum charge of $300 per spam would put them at $2.2 billion.
...but they'll never take our FRRRREEEEEED-oh, wait, wrong Wallace. Sorry.
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.
MySpace can now use some of the lawyers fees they saved to hire a nice bunch of debt collectors to go after him. If Wallace sticks his head up *anywhere* they'll find him and he'll lose pretty much everything he owns to pay the judgment - house, car, computer, etc.
The large sum pretty much means that no matter how much money he makes between now and then he stands to lose all of it the moment he's found.
$300 dollars per spam seems excessive when the average return per spam mail probably lies far below $1. The damages done to the "MySpace" name are worth the $300 per incident, especially when there are over 700,000 documented incidents. The cumulative damage of 700,000 people saying "MySpace is nothing but spam - don't go there" can completely destroy a business.
And besides, these assholes are doing the same thing and worse in a variety of places. If you hit them hard enough on the ones you catch them doing hopefully they'll stop doing it elsewhere as well.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
3 "The 2003 CAN-SPAM Act allows MySpace to collect $100 per violation". Doesn't sound like MySpace have much incentive to make things more secure either, does it? :s
which is totally what she said
cf. "the mall"
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?
If you can't change something, it's not important? I would have thought more if it made no difference to yourself then it's not important, rather than your ability to do anything about it.
Plus I'm sure if he were really driven he could probably take Myspace out for a while with a co-ordinated physical explosion near their servers, and if he was good enough he could take out their backups too. Likewise several spammers have become well known, so he could try to assassinate one. Not very practical, but he could probably do something if he were bothered enough. Or maybe I've just played too many violent computer games.
which is totally what she said
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
Well, MySpace goes against my principle that human beings shouldn't be encouraged to engage in attention whoring. Spammers just piss me off.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
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.)
Every species preys on its own. Every species has its deviants. Did you know that there are ants who will make alcohol, and they can actually imbibe it and be intoxicated, but if they are caught making it or using it they are killed? Did you know that baby eagles eat their nestmates if they hatch too much later? Did you know, you know, anything about animals, or the fact that we are some?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
Indeed, I hate myspace, and I think I've been there possibly 2 times ever.
I hate spam, and last week I had ~1600 of them show up in my spam folders.
Yeah, which one am I going to focus on, which one indeed. Perhaps the one which follows me around offering me low cost answers to bulk up my penis. Never mind that if my penis were any larger it would take a genetically altered walking vagina to use.