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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.
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?
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?
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!
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.
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...