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Facebook Spammer Fined $360 Million
An anonymous reader writes "Facebook has been awarded $360,500,000 in damages against spammer Philip Porembski, who phished the login details of at least 116,000 Facebook users and sent more than 7.2 million spam messages to victims' online friends. Facebook claimed it received more than 8,000 complaints from users as a result of the spam campaign, and more than 4,500 users had deactivated their accounts."
And how much of that are Facebook passing along to the actual victims?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Having an easy-to-use phishing platform?
There was no "fine". This is a civil judgement. Were it a fine, it might have some teeth behind it, but the spammer can essentially laugh off a civil monetary award. Remember, he's a criminal, so it's not like obeying the law is something that he does. All this does is prevent him from inheriting anything from his parents.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
$360million is a meaningless number which accomplishes nothing. $8,000 would actually have an impact. I'm with the Republicans on this one, tort reform is long overdue.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
If you don't pay your civil debts you can be jailed. This is the likely end of the situation.
Put this bozo in prison for a LONG time. Gitmo his ass. He deserves it. We (the tech community) must clean up the spammers, hustlers, and criminals on the internet. If we don't (and no one else will or can do it) then no one will take us seriously and OUR vision of what the internet is supposed to be will be overruled by lawyers, global corporations, and their goon squads.
It is unlikely that this asshole actually has $360,000 to pay the fine. And he committed a serious wide-ranging crime of fraud. So, yes, put this jerk in jail for a long time. Or at least as long as the feds would put a college student in hard jail for selling a little bag of bud to another college student. Which is a long time.
$360 million dollars is a laughable joke. It might as well have been $360 trillion. This guy will never pay even 1% of that amount, and I'm amazed that anyone in the justice department thought Facebook was damaged for $360million because they lost 4,500 users. If so, doing the math, Facebook should pay me around $80,000 just to keep my account activated. Ok, well they can keep 5%, a decent profit margin.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
If you don't pay your civil debts you can be jailed. This is the likely end of the situation.
In America you only go to jail if you REFUSE to pay a civil judgment and get a contempt of court citation.
If you CANNOT pay there's no prison.
Otherwise OJ Simpson would've been in debtor's prison shortly after the Ronald Goldman civil verdict appeals were exhausted.
It's not unheard of for people to make themselves "legally broke" to escape seizure and "legally very low income" to escape garnishment the rest of their lives (or until that state's limit on collecting judgments expires) after a civil judgment, much to the chagrin of whoever got the judgment against them.
Where are the criminal charges? Last time I checked phishing was illegal.
How many of them blew up?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I hate spammers, but I almost as strongly hate the fact that statutory damages can me several orders of magnitude higher than actual damages. (viz Jammie Thomas...)
"So each Facebook account is worth 80,000 dollars? Well who wants to buy mine?"
I can offer you a pirated Britney song, it's abut the same value.
It depends on how it's denominated. $1 bills weigh about 1 gram, which is about 0.0022 pounds. $360 million in $1 bills therefore is about 792,000 pounds.
ASCII tastes bad dude.
Binary it is then.