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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?
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.
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.
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...)
$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.
Yep, an $8000 fine for 7.2 million spam messages *would* have an impact. It would demonstrate that there's no punishment for doing it, and ENCOURAGE IT.
Funny how the same fucks who are always whinging about "tort reform" are typically screaming about how we need to be "tough on crime" with uber-long sentences. Apparently, doing crime only counts if you're unfortunate enough to not be rich.
"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.
> 360million is a meaningless number which accomplishes nothing.
It bankrupts the spammer.
> $8,000 would actually have an impact.
That might not bankrupt him.
> I'm with the Republicans on this one, tort reform is long overdue.
Aside from the fact that "tort reform" is an insurance industry con, this has nothing to do with it. The suit was brought under a Federal statute which fixes the damages. "Tort reform" is about product liability and malpractice torts.
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