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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."
"...Attorney... sentenced..."
Victory.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
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.
I am conflicted.
He was running an illegal online pharmacy.
The writer of the article had previously gotten a judgment against the guy for spamming.
He sued the spammer and won.
The spammer wrote a bad check to him as payment.
Work bio at MMWD
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."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I'm starting to think you're trolling, as you're coming across as deliberately dense, but here ya go.
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.
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.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.