Slashdot Mirror
Man Threatened Spam Attack In $200,000 Extortion Plot
52-year-old Anthony Digati was arrested for trying to extort $200,000 from an insurance firm by threatening to spam them with six million emails unless they paid up. Digati said he would use a spam service and his amazing talents as a "huge social networker" to drag the company "through the muddiest waters imaginable" and presumably unfriend everyone. He added that the price would increase to $3 million if they failed to pay up by Monday, according to federal authorities.
cops are actually taking action. i had a similar incident take place and the cops could not be bothered.
"That's an awfully nice looking email server you've got there. It'd be a shame if something happened to it."
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Also known as Tuesday.
Sent from your iPad.
If I were the company, I would have hired him for PR and marketing department.
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
I had a similar thing happen with CD of the month club. I dunno whats worse, paying them the money to quit hounding me about our "contract"... or owning a Nickleback CD.....
sig loading.......
Might want to avoid extortion targets who are very well experienced, staffed, and funded in risk analysis.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
Here's a Register link to avoid the slimy popups on the linked Fox news site:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/08/cyber_extortion_charges/
DAMN YOU! I had forgotten about tvtropes. Damnit damnit damnit damnit.
Sent from your iPad.
Ok, So I got a funny mod above, then I read the article. This guy is $1.2 mil in debt and was provoked by 'becoming "dissatisfied" with the performance of his own universal life insurance policy.' That's sad. But wait, theres more:
""By the way," he added. "Yes, I am crazy. Yes, I am vindictive. Yes, I am extremely upset."
And to prove he wasn't joking, he allegedly included his personal phone number and email address. "
This man is obviously stressed out and possibly mentally ill. Still think he should go to jail though.
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
The dude did manage to drag the company through slashdot - there is no water muddier.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Dr. Evil: If you don't pay up we're going to send out... ...6 MILLION emails.
[pinky to corner of mouth]
Number Two: Don't you think we send out *more* than six million emails? Six million emails isn't exactly a lot of spam these days. Virtucon alone gets over 9 billion spam messages per day!
[GAHHHHH SLASHDOT FORMATTING.]
Sorry Anthony, but your scheme where a company pays you to not spam them advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based (X) vigilante
approach to preventing spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may
have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal
law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
(X) The police will not put up with it
(X) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential
employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
(X) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
(X) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(X) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
(X) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
If the "smear" consists of truthful but disparaging statements, it would fall within the bounds of free speech.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Music And Film Industry Association of America
1. He wasn't going to spam their email servers, he was going to spam the world to smear their name "drag your company name and reputation, through the muddiest waters imaginable".
2. Looks like he wanted a resolution to the problems he was having because he felt they where doing him wrong. A little different than pure extortion. Basically a "You do me right, or I will tell the whole world of how your wrong me"
He started it would cost them millions to undo what he would do to the companies reputation and that he was very mad at them. This may not be as clear cut a case as the summary makes it.
Now to be honest, I also read it here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/08/cyber_extortion_charges/
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive