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Spammer Faces Decades In Prison For Sending More Than 1 Million Spam Emails (suntimes.com)
mi quotes a report from Chicago Sun-Times: A man has been indicted on federal fraud charges for allegedly sending more than a million spam emails. The indictment charges 36-year-old Michael Persaud of Scottsdale, Arizona, with 10 counts of wire fraud and seeks the forfeiture of four computers, according to a statement from the U.S. attorney's office. The indictment was returned Dec. 9, 2016, and was unsealed after Persaud was arrested last month in Arizona. Between 2012 and 2015, Persaud used multiple IP addresses and domains to send spam emails over at least nine networks, including several servers in Chicago, according to the indictment. He sent more than a million spam emails to people in the U.S. and abroad, using false names to register domains and creating fraudulent "from address" fields to conceal the fact that he was the one sending the emails. Each count carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
mi leaves us with some rather unpleasant imagery, writing: "Personally, I wish [the sentence] carried removal of 1 square millimeter of skin for each message instead."
mi leaves us with some rather unpleasant imagery, writing: "Personally, I wish [the sentence] carried removal of 1 square millimeter of skin for each message instead."
You don't think the punishment may be a bit... draconian?!!!
The numbers are the max allowed for that indictment, sentences that spammers get are a ridiculously low fraction of that.
I do think spamming should be punished harsher than murder, as the cost for the society is greater. Somehow people underestimate the harm if it is spread among many people. Like: you build a coal power plant that reduces the lives of 100k people by a year each -- you've committed the equivalent of more than 1000 murders, yet don't even get a fine for that.
On the other hand, I find the count of "more than 1 million spam emails" to be suspicious. A decade ago, spam response rate was 1 in 12.5M, and I'd expect it to be way lower today. A spammer doesn't spam "for the evulz", he spams because it is profitable. A billion mails per campaign is a low figure, and a spammer doesn't build the infrastructure for just a single run.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Spam is just spam. The sentence seems way over the top.
And murder is just murder. Making the society lose a few decades of life worth is as bad whether it's done by offing a single person or slightly inconveniencing a million. People tend to fail to recognize spammers as just as bad as murderers, just like they obsess about a plane crash that kills 100 while ignoring thousands who died in car crashes that day.
I can filter out the spammer and windows anal probe 10 users at completely and totally at the mercy of M$, right on their desktop, completely ublockable
Newsflash: you can block Windows anal probe 10 too, by keeping it away from your computer. And if you need to run that one program, or test whether your software works on Win 10, or whether your webpage is not mangled by Edge, make a small VM so Microsoft can't spy on anything but that single program.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.