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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
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.
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?
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 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.
Possibly they're not "upholding" the US court ruling, but rather, they're not finding contrary to what a foreign court has found. Splitting hairs? Maybe. The one SCOTUS case that I heard oral arguments for (yes, in person) was a jurisdictional issue. A US merchant had already been found against by the Chinese Admiralty, he didn't like it, counter-sued in the US and it made it's way up to SCOTUS. I think it was Ginsberg that came right out and asked why they should create an international incident by "over-ruling" a foreign court. Sharp lady.
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?
Because this is a fine rather than a jail sentence, no extradition is necessary. By upholding the ruling, the Canadian court is agreeing to collect the money on behalf of the American court.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
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.
Am I the only one who always finds it oddly disturbing that the acronym for Supreme Court of the United States looks an awful lot like "scrotum?"
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Have a look at the concept called "comity".
It's pretty fucking simple this guys... Don't mess it up.
A US court ruling has no power to get anything from the guy as long as he and all his possessions are outside of the US. Before anything happens in Canada a Canadian court needs to look at the case and see if it agrees on the ruling.
- These characters were randomly selected.
Somehow parent seems strangely relevant
Well, that fine didn't include all their spamming, lame ads & sharing of personal information.
I'm sure a security software company could hire him with no problem.
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?
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.
It's pretty fucking simple this guys... Don't mess it up.
A US court ruling has no power to get anything from the guy as long as he and all his possessions are outside of the US. Before anything happens in Canada a Canadian court needs to look at the case and see if it agrees on the ruling.
From the summary:
A ruling by by a US District Court judge in San Jose, California has now been upheld by the Quebec Superior Court
Two uneven halves make it up, they're generally wrinkly and balding, and tend to hang around not doing anything much useful most of the time.
Not too far off the mark?
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
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.
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.
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.
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...
$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?
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.