A Spamming Attorney Gets Sentenced To 40 Months

www.sorehands.com writes "While one spammer, Robert Soloway, gets released on probation, the Feds send another, Robert Smoley, to the slammer for 40 months. I know about Smoley because I tracked him down, and beat him in court. Not only was he an attorney, he still has not lost his license, yet. The IRS contacted me as a result of seeing my web site, and I gladly assisted the IRS in tracking his business. He not only bounced a check on me, but stiffed his local counsel and one of his ISPs."

Comments

Re:babys et al, unprecedented evile conjuring deat

[Scutter]

Aren't you that Time Cube guy?

Attorney... sentenced...

[Kingrames]

"...Attorney... sentenced..."

Victory.

Re:Man..

[airfoobar]

They're Dicks.

Sorry, OP was asking for it.

Not for spamming

[HLJ76]

According to the linked Miami Herald article, he got sentenced for running an online pharmacy, not for spamming. Big change in tone of the article. Spamming just lead to some one being annoyed enough at the guy to help the IRS track him down.

Re:Not for spamming

[Seumas]

Yeah, the headline on Slashdot would tend to elicit rightful cries of "Is spamming a 'crime' worthy of taking several percent of someone's entire life span?", while the real article would elicit rightful responses of "Okay, so the guy was found guilty of running a prescription drug sales scam online".

Someone really needs to vet the sanity of articles before they make Slashdot, but after almost fifteen years, why start now?

Re:Not for spamming

[Anonymous Coward]

So if you add up everyone who facepalmed after reading that post, the collected force would crush someone's skull, so clearly you should be going down for murder as well.

Spamming attorney Vs. IRS

[Anonymous Coward]

I am conflicted.

Re:Spamming attorney Vs. IRS

[Anonymous Coward]

Spamming attorney is doing it because he's the unethical shit breaking the law.

IRS - collecting on behalf of Congress who can never ever live within their means - even when they use Hollywood bookkeeping to "balance" the budget.

The attorney is the shit here.

Any problems with the IRS you'd have to blame Congress for.

Re:Spamming attorney Vs. IRS

[Anonymous Coward]

You should not be. One spamming attorney avoiding paying taxes to the tune of millions means everyone else gets to pay more taxes to make up the difference.

Re:Spamming attorney Vs. IRS

[DWMorse]

As a sage person once stated, only the IRS could bring down Capone.

Re:idiotic laws

[tomhudson]

He went to jail for purchasing half a million dollars in pharmaceutical drugs from a DEA undercover agent.

He was running an illegal online pharmacy.

The writer of the article had previously gotten a judgment against the guy for spamming.

Re:bounced checks?

[micheas]

He sued the spammer and won.

The spammer wrote a bad check to him as payment.

Hey, attorneys invented Internet spam!

[PolygamousRanchKid]

From Wikipedia, "Laurence A. Canter and Martha S. Siegel were partners in a husband-and-wife firm of lawyers who on April 12, 1994 posted the first massive commercial Usenet spam . . . Canter and Siegel were not the first Usenet spammers. The "Green Card" spam was, however, the first commercial Usenet spam, and its unrepentant authors are seen as having fired the starting gun for the legions of spammers that now occupy the Internet." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor_and_Seagal

But this case seems to be more about wire fraud, than spam.

But still, thanks a lot Cantor and Siegel! You should have patented it! "A Method and Process of Sending Unwanted Advertisements to Everyone on the Internet, Which They Don't Want, and Don't need."

Re:bounced checks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Link to the court-ordered judgement, please. I don't think you're following exactly what happened.

I'm starting to think you're trolling, as you're coming across as deliberately dense, but here ya go.

Re:Drama Queen or Troll?

[_Sprocket_]

The guy has been around /. for years. And apparently has spent a fair amount of time swimming with sharks (of the legal profession). I agree that the overall tone is a bit... distracting. But I can imagine the shenanigans he's gone through require a bit of shenanigans of his own to handle. I'd pick his actions over spamers any day.

Re:Drama Queen or Troll?

[Haedrian]

Weird page, wonder what its for. Its excluded from being indexed by crawlers...

There's another trap named in the robots.txt file, but the link doesn't seem to work so I can't view it. Ah well.

Re:Man..

[Culture20]

What is it about Roberts?

They're Dicks.

Richards are Dicks. Roberts are Bobs.

Spam action doesn't get less useful

[damn_registrars]

So some guy who sent out spam was convicted and jailed for something not related to his spam. Really he might as well have been ticketed for jaywalking, it would be just as useful in regards to the spamming epidemic. In the end this kind of crap will never make one iota of difference in global spam volumes or the problems that come from them.

As long as there is money to be made from sending spam, spam will continue to be sent. The only way to end spam is to detach spammers from their revenue sources, period. This did not accomplish that so the spam will continue.

Re:Spam action doesn't get less useful

[Seumas]

Is spam really an epidemic? We have simple means to block almost all spam, so that the average person probably sees maybe a dozen spam messages per year. If everyone is inoculated against something, so nobody is thereby being infected with said virus, is it really still an "epidemic"?

Re:Spam action doesn't get less useful

[damn_registrars]

Is spam really an epidemic?

Yes, it is

We have simple means to block almost all spam

But we pay a nontrivial cost for those filters. Even if you only use gmail for email, and you trust the "free" google filters, you are still paying for them. The cost is passed down to the consumer to pay for bandwidth, CPU time, storage space, and of course updates to filter rules.

If everyone is inoculated against something, so nobody is thereby being infected with said virus, is it really still an "epidemic"?

That is not a fair comparison and I'll tell you why.

When we began inoculation against polio, we eventually wiped out the virus from the main population. The virus could not spread and could not infect (of course now it may be coming back but that is a different situation). The cost of polio dropped to almost nothing because in the developed world people no longer were infected by the virus.

On the other hand, people all over the world are constantly paying the cost of spam. Just because they don't see (much of) it doesn't mean it no longer exists. Spam still consumes bandwidth, storage, and CPU time. And of course we need to also consider the false positive rate of spam filtering; the lost productivity and economic progress that we pay for as a result of legitimate email that is errantly thrown out as spam by filtering techniques. Those who believe in filters have to update their filters because the spammers are constantly finding new ways to get around them. Even if the average person sees very few spam emails in a year, it doesn't mean they don't have to pay for them.

And the fact that so many people are oblivious to what spam costs them may in some ways be even worse.

So in other words, yes. Spam is still very much an epidemic. It will cease to be an epidemic when spam is no longer sent; regardless of whether or not it is viewed.

Re:Spam action doesn't get less useful

[Seumas]

We have simple means to block almost all spam

But we pay a nontrivial cost for those filters. Even if you only use gmail for email, and you trust the "free" google filters, you are still paying for them. The cost is passed down to the consumer to pay for bandwidth, CPU time, storage space, and of course updates to filter rules.

We pay for inoculations as well. They aren't free and often are not paid for by the individual being inoculated. If you starve it out, the problem will go away and that is MUCH more feasible than targeting thousands of amorphous spammers around the globe (often in places where they are not reachable by any punitive means).

If everyone is inoculated against something, so nobody is thereby being infected with said virus, is it really still an "epidemic"?

That is not a fair comparison and I'll tell you why.

When we began inoculation against polio, we eventually wiped out the virus from the main population. The virus could not spread and could not infect (of course now it may be coming back but that is a different situation). The cost of polio dropped to almost nothing because in the developed world people no longer were infected by the virus.

On the other hand, people all over the world are constantly paying the cost of spam. Just because they don't see (much of) it doesn't mean it no longer exists. Spam still consumes bandwidth, storage, and CPU time. And of course we need to also consider the false positive rate of spam filtering; the lost productivity and economic progress that we pay for as a result of legitimate email that is errantly thrown out as spam by filtering techniques. Those who believe in filters have to update their filters because the spammers are constantly finding new ways to get around them. Even if the average person sees very few spam emails in a year, it doesn't mean they don't have to pay for them.

And the fact that so many people are oblivious to what spam costs them may in some ways be even worse.

So in other words, yes. Spam is still very much an epidemic. It will cease to be an epidemic when spam is no longer sent; regardless of whether or not it is viewed.

I don't see a significant difference from the inoculation metaphor. Like a virus, spam only continues to "spread" if it continues to find purchase within a host. Or, rather, to be viewed and responded to. The only reason spammers continue to do what they do is because of the handful of people who don't take precautions against spam, like people who don't protect their children from mumps, rubella, or smallpox.

When it comes down to it, spam is a thing like many others in the tech world. A thing which can best be addressed by preventative technology rather than trying to stick some kid in pound-me-in-the-ass hard-core prison, for writing a script that spams a bunch of crap to a million accounts.

Of course, there's another similarity to viruses and inoculations. The sickness fuels an entire industry (medical and pharmaceutical or technological and consultative) on which a large economy is fueled. A sort of "prison industry / criminal legislation" symbiosis.

Re:Spam action doesn't get less useful

[sco08y]

Is spam really an epidemic? We have simple means to block almost all spam, so that the average person probably sees maybe a dozen spam messages per year. If everyone is inoculated against something, so nobody is thereby being infected with said virus, is it really still an "epidemic"?

Part of living in the States is that we don't know what _real_ epidemics are, just like we don't know what _real_ poverty is like.

A better analogy would be water quality, which may not be an epidemic, but is pretty damned close. If you go to a third world country, your body will build up a tolerance to the local water, after several rounds of diarrhea. But it's not real immunity, it's just your system constantly pouring on resources to fight the infection. You basically just get used to being sick.

We've all built up this tolerance for spam to where we don't notice it, but all that stuff is still there, the water is still filthy, and it's still affecting you. I don't check my spam folders; there are thousands of spams, so I just hope that I don't get a critical false positive. I don't bother trying to set up my own mail server, it will either get black listed if I screw up, or I'll have to wrestle with configuring SpamAssassin or something like that.

Re:Why is spam evil?

[micker]

Unfortunately its troll mentality turned towards civics... Where the techie crowd was once the first to rise to the defense of free speech, lately the trolls have taken over and want to regulate speech in all forms.

Re:Why is spam evil?

[mewshi_nya]

For starters, all that spam is basically junk mail where the sender didn't pay any postage. It's an abuse of the system in a lot of ways:
1) the strain it puts on the network (all those e-mails take up a good chunk of space)
2) the strain it puts on the mail servers (both in terms of processing to remove junk mail and in terms of hard drive space)
3) the fact that a significant portion of spam is sent by botnets without the users' knowledge

As to why people on /. hate it more... just think of how many people on this site have to spend hours trying to fix/update/manage their server's spam filters.

Re:Get a life

[Foobar of Borg]

Spamming is a technical problem with a technical solution. On a personal level, I feel deeply suspicious of people who take it upon themselves to act in what they assume might as well be my best interests. There are laws controlling spam and there are law enforcement agencies (God knows the US has no shortage of those). Silverstein should find a new hobby, like suing his neighbors for not trimming their lawns on time or failing to scoop dog shit.

Your post advocates a

(X) technical (X) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(X) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(X) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(X) Technically illiterate politicians
(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(X) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
(X) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!