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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!
Who knew that Billion was spelled differently in Canada, maybe it is like color and colour.
In this case, the spammer went with the, no lawyer defence and didn't even bother to turn up. Big catch with that is "Guerbuez fooled its users into providing him with their user names and passwords" and that is interfering with a computer network a criminal offence. The evidence for which has now been established in a civil court and the spammer has show complete contempt for that court not only be freely admitting his guilt but also by mocking the fine by saying he will declare bankrupt and keep all the criminal proceeds from that crime.
This then forces US law to intervene and seek criminal prosecution for interfering with a computer network, via obtaining user name and passwords under false pretences and using that to fraudulently misrepresent the products he was advertising as being recommended by friends of the victims and also interfering with those 'friends' computer network.
You have the right to remain silent, remember those words when you want to get rich quick by breaking the law and don't make a ass out of yourself by publicly bragging about and defending your criminal activities.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
It's even worse than that in this case. According to the article, he was compromising other people's accounts using fake websites, and then using those accounts to send his spam so that it would appear to be from their friends. So, it's not just spam in this case - it's fraud and identity theft.
If it were up to me, he would also be going to jail.
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
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.
RTFA: "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."
"After Guerbuez gained access to user's personal profiles, he used computer programs to send out millions of messages promoting a variety of products, including marijuana and penis-enlargement products, Facebook said."
How much damage is that to you?
Whatever the damages are, to me the punitive fines of USD100 per user seem fair to me. So he should still be looking at USD400+ million in fines.
I don't think you want to encourage "economies of scale" when it comes to crimes.
So if you figure out a clever but illegal way to paste ads on 4 million people's front-doors, you should only be fined the same amount as someone who does it on one door?
Yes those people "could always remove the crap on their front door", but if you keep letting people get away with it, you end up with crap permanently on your door.
You do city-scale damage, you get city-scale fines. Sounds fair to me. Don't like it, think before you do it.
It's like those littering fines. Yes it doesn't cost that much to remove one coke can from the ground, or a discarded wrapper.
I don't see why someone should get a smaller fine per offense than a "normal person" just because they chose to make money in a way which involves littering on a massive scale.