Slashdot Mirror
Canadian Spammer Fined Over $1 Billion
innocent_white_lamb writes "A man has been fined ONE BEELYUN DOLLARS (yes, really) for sending 4,366,386 spam messages that were posted on Facebook. He was fined $100 for each message, and including punitive damages he now owes $1,068,928,721.46. A ruling by a US District Court judge in San Jose, California has now been upheld by the Quebec Superior Court (the defendant lives in Montreal)."
Asking for help paying for it!
I just have to think -- when was the last time a large corporation was fined $1 billion for anything? This has to be just because he had a crappy lawyer or something. Justice quality depends on personal resources in America, no doubt about it.
Currently hooked on AMP
One BEEYLUN DOLLARS! And Sharks with frickin' laser beams!
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
Who knew that Billion was spelled differently in Canada, maybe it is like color and colour.
This is something that I've tried and tried and tried to explain to some of my friends that work in marketing. When you are sending spam, you are literally using somebody *else's* property in a way that they don't want you to use it in order to give them messages.
This should be looked at no differently than causing unused speakers in my house to play radio advertisements when I want them turned off.
You send spam, and it's taking up a limited resource (disk, bandwidth, power, man hours, etc.) to your end and against the will of the recipient. I really hope that there are more cases like this.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
Don't worry that only works out to about twelve Canadian dollars.
Spam seems an attractive way of getting a message out because it is so inexpensive per message. Given the volume, the amount per message to act as a deterrent doesn't have to be that high. A buck would probably do it. Though perhaps he's really rich and they wanted a figure that equates with certainty to "all your money". I guess that's not an option when sentencing -- "How much ya got?"
Loose lips lose spit.
If he files bankruptcy, and Facebook doesn't get their billion dollars, can Facebook claim the billion as a 'loss' (a la 'bad debt', 'uncollectable account', etc) and get a tax break out of it?
How can a Canadian court "uphold" a ruling from a US district court? Why do Canadian courts even care unless this guy is going to be extradited?
Funny..a company was just fined a few million for (illegal) human experimentation of their bone anchoring glue which resulted in several deaths, but a spammer that didn't cause any physical harm or death is fined a billion dollars. Let's get some file sharers fined for more than the GDP of several small nations combined too, for good measure.
I hate spammers, but you're telling me that a few million spam messages are worth more than several LIVES and ILLEGAL MEDICAL EXPERIMENTATION ON HUMANS?
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
From TFA: "He’s also barred from opening a Facebook account."
This is the way Bi-Coloured Python-Rock-Snakes always talk.
A ruling by by a US District Court judge in San Jose, California has now been upheld by the Quebec Superior Court (the defendant lives in Montreal)."
How does that work between countries, especially since both courts seem to be creations of their respective state governments.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Better start responding to all those emails where they need help transferring money in from those swish bank accounts.
We all know that he'll prolly never be able to repay it all... but most likely he'll have his wages garnished for the rest of his life. End up working 2 jobs where one job goes to pay off the fine.
C|N>K
Here this worthless tool sends a bunch of Emails to a bunch of idiots about penis enlargement and gets a fine of one billion plus. On the other hand we have Citibank who misleads investors and regulators about Billions in losses and bad investments and they get a fine of 75 million. That is only a days worth of profits from laundering the drug cartels money. Gotta love the FTC and the courts, they know where the priorities are!
[url=http://www.jerseys-2010.com/wholesale nfl jerseys[/url] [url=http://www.jerseys-2010.com/cheap nhl jerseys[/url] [url=http://www.jerseys-2010.com/football jerseys[/url] [url=http://www.jerseys-2010.com/nba shop[/url] wholesale nfl jerseys cheap nhl jerseys football jerseys nba shop [url=http://www.hatonsale.com/winter cap[/url] [url=http://www.hatonsale.com/red bull cap[/url] [url=http://www.hatonsale.com/monster hat[/url] [url=http://www.hatonsale.com/new era hats[/url] winter cap red bull cap monster hat new era hats Monster Energy Hats Dc Shoes Ken Block 43 Ford Monster Dc Shoes Ken Block 43 Ford Monster NBA Detroit Pistons Reebok NFL Jerseys Philadelphia Eagles Kids Kansas City Royals PHILLES http://www.jerseys-2010.com/ http://www.hatonsale.com/
A 1 billion dollar fine is absurd. First, there's no way he can ever pay it. Second, it is way out of proportion to the harm caused. Third, it undermines respect for the courts by making them look out to lunch, foolish and/or vindictive.
Think about what a billion dollars represents: the lifetime's earnings of a hundreds of well-paid people, or a thousand low-wage people, or the GDP of a small city. Spam sucks, but the damage this guy caused doesn't measure up.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
Judgments like this one are missing the target. The real victim is the public, not Facebook. After all, they could have placed some kind of limitation that prevent a user of sending more than 5 messages per 30 sec, for instance. That makes me wonder in which case a fine like this could really be to the advantages of the victims. What if it's a company that is sending spam? Frankly, if this case occurs, the company will probably close and some workers will loose their job. Sending spam must be considered a criminal act - the real way "criminal" mean. I think that the only dissuasive punishment are the cold hard prison bars. Something between 5 and 10 years, without the possibility to use a computer for another 5 years. We have to send a clear message and stay away from the economic side of the crime because the only ones who get money in this story are the lawyers.
Horatio would approve.
If they "fined" him $100 for each message, then with the 20+ messages that I got because of him means that the US government should be giving ME that money. I'm the one who got spammed, why is the government getting money for what he did wrong to me? That does not make sense.
$1,068,928,721.46 ÷ 4,366,386 spam messages = $244.80 per message. I know we're probably trying to have a deterrent effect on spam, and it's a LOT lower than copyright fines, but it's still kind of high
... when a billion dollars was real money!
wtf man
Come on, let's at least be professional! It's no wonder that some members and former members of this site bemoan its quality, as well as the quality of its stories. ONE BEELYUN DOLLARS?! Isn't decent English a reasonable expectation from a professional source? It's not even a good joke.
To anyone who meta-moderates and bumps these stories, I thought we we're better than repeating in-jokes.
Also, there's a typo.
Also, I think the billion dollar fine is a bit much. As it's been said before, other lawsuits concerning much graver, more depraved actions and situations come nowhere near this fine, yet they deserve to be at the very least the same. The fine is also not even going to be paid, not in full at least, simply because the defendant does not have the means to pay it. So for all intents and purposes, the fine doesn't even really matter. He should have gotten a reasonable punishment he deserved, and the victims of his actions should be able to see justice served, and in this case, the justice is the full payout of everything legitimately owed to them.
Somehow parent seems strangely relevant
I wonder how much the fine would have been if each spam message contained a song "owned" by one of the MAFIAA. You could generate a fine larger than the entire money supply of the whole world put together. This feels almost like a challenge now.
4,366,386 messages x $200,000 = $873,277,200,000 or $873.3 billion. Actually, it's only a couple hundred times more than what he owes now, which is more than the total amount of money the U.S. government gave the banks in the TARP program, but still just under 1/3 of the U.S. national debt as of October 2009. Are there any economists out there who can tell us if this amount of money is printed (Canada or U.S.)? Would it be theoretically possible for him to walk into the court, and pay in cash?
Fines are typically exempt from bankruptcy in Canada. I don't know if there are reasonable limits to fines that could cut this down to something that can be paid back, but, if not, essentially the court just forced the guy to pay this for the rest of his life. This is incentive to create a new identity, perhaps get work under the table (maybe criminal, besides the tax evasion).
Punitive damages? Good! I knew that you could. This isn't restitution, where the amount matches some arbitrary measure of costs incurred (harm done). This is to make the punishment so deliberately disproportional to the actual cost/benefit that others avoid the same offense because its such a bad business risk.
I will agree with spammers that an individual spam is not a major imposition. However, it does cost people something. E-mail isn't free, you have to maintain bandwidth to receive it (a double digit percentage of our university's usage is e-mail in various forms) and it does take time for people to delete it. Not a lot, but some. So, let's be fair, we'll say a 0.1 cent fine and 0.1 second of jail or probation time for each message. Oh what's that? You sent 1 trillion spam messages? Sorry, guess you are fucked then. Should have considered the scale of your operation.
I like it because it would really hammer home that the problem with spam is the scale, and that punishments would scale with that. So suppose you spam your company's mailing list a few times and rather than ask you to knock it off, your boss presses charges. Ok well you sent 10 messages to 1,000 people so 10,000 messages. You are on the hook for $10 in fines and about 16 minutes of probation. A mild slap on the wrist, basically, unlikely they'd even prosecute. However you are a major pharmaceutical spammer that has sent out 3 billion messages? That'll be $3 million please and we'll see you in about 9 and a half years.
I realize that the way the laws are structured now such a thing couldn't actually happen, I just like the idea. An individual unwanted e-mail message is not a big deal, that is true, it is the scale and thus the scale should determine the punishment.
Because they're posting bad merchandise replicas using a bad HTML replica?
I guarantee you this happened because Facebook somehow influenced the judge so they could get a positive billion dollars on their balance sheet. Accounting is wonderful that way -- you can claim money you don't really have because somebody owes it to you. Nevermind the fact they could never collect on it. The (probably short lived) boost to their various financial metrics will probably net a few million a piece for several of the Facebook execs.
Divide it down and maybe it is more reasonable. Suppose he sent 1 trillion spam messages, that could be a fine of just 0.1 cents per message sent. A spam message does cause harm. E-mail takes bandwidth to move around and bandwidth costs money. We could save a good bit on bandwidth costs at work if we could eliminate spam. It would save on incoming mail bandwidth, but also on bandwidth when people check their mail from off campus and get a spam message the filter didn't catch.
While the harm of an individual message is low, it is the scale that is the problem. Now I don't know the scale of this guy's operations, but I do know that spam is massive. The amount we get is staggering. It is at least 10:1 spam:real e-mail, probably more, and that is just what our filter catches. If his spam sent ranged in the 10+ billion messages amount, well then the fine per message doesn't look so unreasonable, does it?
So, uh, good for the courts to uphold the fines, but the punitive damages are a little obscene, don't you think? Lets do some cypherin' shall we? 4,366,386 * 100 = $436,638,600 in fines, plus what? a few grand in court fees and filing fees? So the punitive damages caused to Facebook was $632,290,121.46?! Did it really cause that much damage? Or is this FBs new business model to actually turn a profit? I think i can clean up a few million spam messages for $632 million bucks... and i won't charge facebook a dime of that. ;)
I'm aware that businesses are tailoring services to narrower demographics, but I had no idea that there were financial institutions that catered solely to drag queens.
I still think that is still not enough. The annoyance caused by one spam mail is worth more than a mere $100
Nelson: HA HA!
...to pay up the fine?
To just update you folks who don't like to read and feel like we should cut this guy a break, he didn't just send annoying spam messages - he conned passwords out of users and then fraudulently accessed their accounts. If it was just the spam that would be one thing, but this is much more serious than that. As far as article summaries go this one is pretty crappy because it misses the whole point of the story.
to all the other little buttfucker spammers out there.
Sorry I don't have anything intelligent to add. Just that I will sleep better tonight. And maybe find less spam in my inbox tomorrow.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
You know this is what bugs the hell out of me, it ain't the spam, its the stupidity. So as a public service to future spammers let the old Hairyfeet get up on his stump and pass some common sense...
ATTENTION SPAMMERS...You aren't doing this for your health, right? you actually want to make money doing this one can assume, correct? Then TARGET YOUR FRICKING AUDIENCE!!! dumbasses! This is a fricking geeksite, do you think ANYBODY here gives a shit about sports? what an idiot! Watch and learn moron, THIS is how you sell to geeks..*..Cheap iPad knockoffs!!! Cool funky flashdrives!!! Cheap game emulator running MP3 players!!!
See how easy that was? I bet there is a fricking stampede at that site right now, and their servers are glowing red hot from the giant nerd herd hitting the goodies. It is ALL about targeting your audience. Want to make money with food? Set up a donut shop next to the weight watchers. Want to make money off geeks? Then toys with lots of buttons, flash memory, dodgy hard drives, fake CPUs, all these things are like candy to babies.
*...I'm not actually getting any money for those links, just showing what one would use to target this audience, well and I like cheap toys too ;-)
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Don't worry, it's only about 100 USD.
its spelled b - i - l - l - i - o - n - a - y - e.
Excellent. I've been saying for 15+ years that the way to stop spam is to make the fines if caught so high that no matter how much the spamming earns you, the fine will bancrupt you. Everything else means that, taking the low chances for being actually caught into account, the rational choice for spammers remains to continue spamming.
Now this is settled, we can work on raising the conviction rate.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
He moves to Zimbabwe...can pay the fine with next weeks bread money!
The joke here is that the courts have virtually guaranteed that this guy will go back to spamming by giving him such a large monetary punishment. I mean consider from his perspective: he can no longer make any money legally (other than a very basic income that the courts will allow him to keep), so he's forced to go under the table (or live a paltry life). Considering that his skills and contacts all revolve around spamming... Guess what his next illicit job is going to be? Spamming!
On top of that, claiming that a single spam causes $100 worth of damages is ridiculous, verging on incompetent. A spam causes maybe a cent worth of damages, rounding to the nearest penny, even including wasting peoples time and whatnot. Double that for punitive and the total becomes a much more sensible $100,000.
Uh, if you want to use cities as a measurement then it's NOT absurd.
Apparently he annoyed at least 4 million people. He took over their accounts: "According to Facebook, Guerbuez fooled its users into providing him with their usernames and passwords. One method was the use of fake websites that posed as legitimate destinations."
I'd say 4 million people is a reasonable amount for a city.
You cause city-size damage, you get city-size fines. Sounds fair enough. Maybe the damage bit of USD100 is too high, but the punitive part doesn't.
What's the punitive fine for littering in your city?
I don't think he should be jailed though unless he persists in misbehaviour - I assume he's no physical danger to other people.
A fine of $1,000,000,000 USD for *each* spam message would be more appropriate... not kidding.
Now they just have to get him to pay up... After they've taken every scrap of property he owns, I think forced hard labor to the tune of $5/hour (provided he works at least 18 hours with no break each day). If he fails it's no food, half the pay and 20 hours minimum the next month. Putting up as the bitch for the daily gang rapes yields a few extra bucks. If he fails to each his keep, they'll transfer him to some serious punishment...
Human experimentation is more serious, certainly, in terms of quality of damage done, but THAT particular case only covered a relative few people....the equivalent of setting off a car bomb in a crowded theater, if you want an analogy.
What THIS jerkweed did was spam, identity theft, fraud, and will have economic effects and cruelty that will span a generation or two, not entirely as a result of his actions, but partly due to the disparity of how our current economic system is failing the underclasses. His crime is possibly the equivalent of breeding a nearly indestructible new species of cockroach, and setting it loose upon an entire city, while dumping tons of horse manure upon same city while laughing on a loudpeaker like a maniacal idiot, only for those people to discover that the cockroaches just happen to be carriers of a particularly nasty strain of dysentery.
Of course, YOU might be able to think of a better analogy than this, and I invite any takers. Heh, it might even be fun!
Probably not, though.
French trader Kerviel was sentenced to $6.7 billion. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/06/business/global/06bank.html
Watch great movie opening scenes!
You're right about the USA, of course. An expensive suit, a good haircut, a fancy lawyer, and even somebody as guilty as OJ can get away with murder.
No sig today...
spam is annoying but any smart user avoids it. well any ad on the net. a billion dollars would bankrupt most corps let alone a single person. yet another ruling that is useless and pointless being they will never collect any of it. with that debt he better hope he never loses his job. no job wile hire on with that kind of debt. all they did was eliminate his abilty for loans.
What damages? What damage was done by this guy?
Apart from stealing a load of bandwidth and wasting about a couple of years of productivity (deleting four million spams adds up), he set up a load of fake websites to steal Facebook user's passwords (which is how he sent the spam).
Is that your definition of 'harmless fun'? Seems other people don't agree with you...
No sig today...
That will teach him!
..that Facebook will give some of the money to the people who where spammed, RIGHT?
Else, the court should give WAY less to Facebook, probably in the order of 1 dollar/spam message.
Moderation is overrated.
There is a Utopian sci-fi story in the Earthbound series where death penalty and imprisonment was largely abolished. Instead persons convicted of serious crimes were sentenced to so called economic incarceration providing they were not psychically dangerous to others. They were free to move around and do whatever they wanted but could not engage in any economic transactions besides basic sustenance (basic food, shelter, medical care etc.). In practice they were roaming around as beggars during the term of their conviction.
In many cases economic incarceration makes more sense than putting a criminal in prison. But lifetime of minimum income seems too harsh. Even murderers can hope to get paroled in 20 or 30 years.
Something that never fails to amuse me is the ERN YER DIPLOMA NOWZ! spam sent to my account @alum.mit.edu ....
On the bright side of things for him, it's less than a gigadollar.
my blog
Thankfully, 1 USD= -0.0038284 CAD, so he should be fine.
They did target their audience. After all, they just got some free advice from geeks on how to better target their audience.
I have no sig yet I must scream.
WIth the amount of money our Government has been spending on wars, bailouts, and the like, one day we too may have a billion dollar fine just for living in the US! :-)
Heh, the one I loved best was the one where I got a mail from the sysadmin from the domain I own telling me that I downloaded illegal stuff and if I would like to report myself to the FBI (which has no jurisdiction in the Netherlands) by running the program they sent me.
I walked to a mirror and gave my sysadmin a stern look after which he slapped my hand to punish me for my evil deeds.
This is the sig that says NI (again)
Can they legally come after you children when you die if you owe money, or is that just a myth, would hate to be one of his kids....
Also, can he declare personal bankruptcy and then just move forward from this owing nothing???
I thought you spelt it "bouillon"?
Ah oui, but jusque en Kebecke. Here en le Montreal we often say "Ehpardonez moi, allez vous un bouillon dolare? Non? Moi aussi."
You relented because you are a geek..
It's obviously an exorbitant amount. This is fantasy accounting if they think that's the cost of each spam. People are stupid and vindictive. 10 cents per message would be too much.
... IIRC, they won't take money he needs to live (rent, food, transportation, etc), so they'll get his spending-money for the rest of his life (assuming they bother trying to collect), and that'll be the end of it.
Makes you wonder what the point of throwing such a stupidly large number at him - what private citizen has a billion dollars AND doesn't have the means to just bail to a non-extraditing country?
In the future, people are going to be increasingly getting "rat-f*cked" by the system.
$100 each? Or, is it like the american legal system where the victims just get a warm feeling in their hearts just knowing they made lawyers richer?
I've already tried to get through to these idiots...
http://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1617596&cid=31847296
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
--execute spammers.
No really, I mean it. Makes for great deterrence, and if you add up all other people's time wasted by this spammer, that's easily a lifetime at least, right?
Quote the spammer, “If there’s anything that does hit my e-mail box that I didn’t ask to receive, I’ll simply press the delete button."
Any spammer which uses this line of argument should be locked in a prison cell with a 1200 baud terminal logged in to an email account. He only gets fed if he responds to the "Your food is ready" email within 15 minutes.
The email address he is given for this purpose is posted on every spammer list on Earth.
Set up a donut shop next to the weight watchers.
I think a more ideal location for a donut shop would be next door to the police station! I mean, the folks at Weight Watchers aren't going to want to be seen going inside a donut shop, even though they might stop for donuts on the ay home out of the place's sight. Cops, OTOH...
Free Martian Whores!
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Sounds like pollutantus literati!
David Macaulay, author and artist of those wonderful books Castle, Cathedral, and City, also wrote a more tongue-in-cheek book called Motel of the Mysteries . It's a humorous look at how assumptions can be made (and be wildly off the mark) in the process of archaeology, as we try to decipher the uses and meanings of various bits of antique detritus. The key plot point is that it's thousands of years in the future, and archaeologists are finally digging North America out of a great disaster that happened in 1985:
Worth the read. Enjoy!
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
"Hello, this is Homer Simpson aka Happy Dude! The court has ordered me to call every person in town to apologize for my telemarketing scam. I'm sorry. If you can find it in your heart to forgive me, send one dollar to : Sorry Dude, 742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield. You have the power!
Well I'm in the south and here the cops don't hang out at the donut shop........they hang out at the chicken shack!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
He has the attitude of "I don't care." He is a total douche bag, and jerk all rolled into one. I will not post his website here cause /. is a respected place, and I don't want to boast this guys attitude any higher than it is with his website linked to /. But you guys really need to check out his website. Just type in his full name, and his website is third from the top, or could be second from the top by now What he boast about is just mind boggling. He loves his PR rank now, and rambles about all of his publicity, and how many support him. Plus he calls everyone that hates him intellectual midgets. Let me slap him around a few times, then punch him a few times. While I do that, for a long time.... Someone can put a lien on everything he owns, and sell it off. For the final Finnish... I will go with a swift kick to the you know where. I just don't think his fans know the true story of what he did. Or something is missing. BTW he has a channel at youtube too.
The guy is just going to claim bankruptcy and not pay. Simple as that. These court damages to individuals for exorbitant amounts of money are silly, and are just for headlines. It make it look like a corrupt ineffective, biased system is working properly to the masses, when anyone that thinks about it is going to see how silly these rulings are.
It was just a week ago that that guy in France who was in charge of billions of dollars of funds, and lost it all using risky trading practices was ordered to re-pay several billion dollars. Its stilly! One news program went and extrapolated how long it would take him to pay it off using his current consultant salary, and it was well over 100,000 years (and that was probably ALL his salary EVERY year).. I mean come on, in what world does that make any sense whatsoever? It is just stupid.