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U.S. Attorney Jeff Sullivan said Wednesday that the case is the first in the country in which federal prosecutors have used identity theft statutes to prosecute a spammer for taking over someone else's Internet domain name. Soloway could face decades in prison.He's one of the top 10 spammers in the world," said Tim Cranton, a Microsoft Corp. lawyer who is senior director of the company's Worldwide Internet Safety Programs.
Prosecutors say Soloway used computers infected with malicious code to send out millions of junk e-mails since 2003. The computers are called "zombies" because owners typically have no idea their machines have been infected
Forbes [forbes.com]
So why not fine them $10 bucks per mail, confiscate whatever they have and make them work for the rest in some remote prison until all their bills are covered.
In addition their clients should be liable for these sums as well.
[spamhaus.org...]
Soloway's violations of the U.S. CAN-SPAM law and various state anti-spam laws resulted in his being sued successfully by a number of plaintiffs, including Microsoft Corporation and Robert Braver, owner of an Oklahoma-based ISP. Both Microsoft and Braver received damage awards of millions of dollars. Soloway never paid these awards, claiming that he lived off of the proceeds of a family trust and was therefore "judgement-proof." In September 2005 in Oklahoma City, after Soloway had fired his lawyers and then failed to appear to represent himself in court, U.S. District Judge Ralph G. Thompson issued a permanent injunction against Soloway, forbidding him to continue sending spam that violated the CAN-SPAM act. Soloway ignored this injunction as well and continued to spam.Today, Soloway was arrested and brought before the U.S. District Court in Seattle, Washington, where he was indicted on multiple counts of money laundering, wire fraud, mail fraud, and identity theft by a federal grand jury. If convicted of all charges, he could theoretically face up to 65 years in prison. Although his custodial sentence if convicted is likely to be substantially less than 65 years, he nonetheless faces a significant stay in the U.S. federal penitentiary system.
Let him rot.
Don't get me wrong, I hate spammers as much as the next guy. But "decades" in prison"? There are murderers and rapists that don't spend decades in prison
I totally agree. The punishment has to fit the crime. But even for murderers and rapists the more people they harm, the longer the sentences get. Or maybe the individual sentences are not longer, but they are made to be served consecutively, rather than concurrently.
For sending an unsolicited email? Really.. maybe a 1 hour sentence would be appropriate.
For zombifying some unsuspecting person's machine? maybe five hours.
So let's be very conservative and say 1,000,000 emails sent (I know, that's probably not even a day's work).. and 1,000 machines infected.
5,000 hours for the infected machines.. 5,000 divided by 24 hours in a day... 208 days. Less than a year.
1,000,000 hours for the emails.. divided by 24 hours... 41,666 days. 114 years.
I suppose we could be lenient and let him serve the consecutive sentences for the zombies concurrently with the consecutive sentences for the emails. :)
federal authorities said computer users across the Web could notice a decrease in the amount of junk e-mail.
. . . waiting . . . checking . . . nope, just as much now as before. :(
The cost is that (a) I have spent hundreds of hours fortifying my system to drop 99.9% of junk automatically (b) I still have to manually analyse and drop 10s of SPAM messages for every real/"ham" message (c) I lose real "ham" in the process and so mail is now less reliable than when I ran a UUCP-based ISP in 1992.
Rgds
Damon
federal authorities said computer users across the Web could notice a decrease in the amount of junk e-mail.. . . waiting . . . checking . . . nope, just as much now as before. :(
One supposes he's already been less busy since the day he had his collar felt. But you're right, there's just about as much crap as always.
A co-host slot with Rosie on her new talk show.
or
The guy that honks the horn on QVC.
federal authorities said computer users across the Web could notice a decrease in the amount of junk e-mail.. . . waiting . . . checking . . . nope, just as much now as before.
Did you really expect it to change? Much like nature, the internet abhors a vacuum.
. . . waiting . . . checking . . . nope, just as much now as before.
My spam almost completely stopped when the quake a few months back caused service interruption between the US and China. As the repairs went forward and service was completely restored, so was the flood of spam.
Anyone know exactly what was broken and how we can break it again?
No. The fake-drugs and bootleg-drug fraud industries are primary supporters. There's no relation to the real pharmaceutical industry.
In the same way, the stock fraud industry is another big supporter. But the NYSE isn't involved.
federal authorities said computer users across the Web could notice a decrease in the amount of junk e-mail.
That comment is sooo lame. It just show how stupid/ignorant are the authorities about spam problems. Probably they thought it was responsible, for say, 30% to 40% of the world's spam?
I don't know who he is, nor exactly how big his operation was, but I can blindly bet he didn't cause more than 3% of the global email spam. Just a guess.
Something like:
CHILD process e-mail TOUCHING and EXCHANGE.
One thing that drives me batty about this, is there would be no spam if someone was not buying stuff. Obviously it is not expensive for him to do what he is doing, as he is stealing most of the resources to do it, and other costs are minimal.
That being said, nobody would do it if the return were 0. So we know that some people out there are buying/partaking in this crap to a large enough degree that it makes the spammers money.
Who is paying for this stuff... And I would like to do something with them while we are at it, for enabling all this nonsense.
Did it say anywhere if he actually had the money to pay the previous $10 million and $7 million settlements? If not they could/should add debtors prison onto the sentence.
Added:
What burns me even worse are those who spoof random e-mail addresses at your domain as the return address resulting in thousands of "sorry your e-mail has been returned" e-mails in the catch-all box which you can't have anymore. Before we had it auto-dump to the bit-bucket, we used to literally have too many to download off the server each day.
[edited by: MikeNoLastName at 2:15 am (utc) on June 1, 2007]
As for resenting his Mercedes -- yeah, I kinda resent people who make their money criminally, thumb their noses at the courts, and continue to profit.
This particular guy has worked really, really hard to earn himself a ten-year vacation in the land of cinder blocks. Such hard work should not go unrewarded.
If he had no choice but to spam in order to survive, he would've limited his spamming to that level of income.
After all, the public at large loves seeing the riches of celebrities etc. on display... there are even whole TV shows about it. The flashy lifestyle only causes resentment when it becomes symbolic of the size of the crime.
[petitions.pm.gov.uk...]
I also tried to start a separate petition to humiliate/punish/reprimand people stupid enough to BUY from SPAMmers since as has often enough pointed out, including in this thread, if people didn't buy then SPAM would die. Maybe someone else would like to start the 'ABSO the buyers' petition?
Rgds
Damon
my servers crashed many times due to those kinda spams.
He should be banned from touching pc for next 20 years.
people stupid enough to BUY from SPAMmers
Face it, 'puters have become a cheap appliance and you don't need to be smart to own an appliance. Just paid about $700 for a refrigerator and you can get a cheap computer for about 1/3rd that.
Our host installed GreyListing, I don't remember when I saw last spam email
for real ZERO SPAM, and it gives me more time to defend the infrastructure against SCRAPER BOTS
:)
no one got injured, no babies got ate and no one died.
People always say that with white collar crime, as if since they did not directly affect the health of one single person, they are not a "bad" person.
White collar crimes affect thousands, even millions of people incrementally. Spamming affects me in that every few weeks I have to spend a few hours cleaning it up, in customer service emails that get bounced inadvertantly to junk mail and in frustration. This translates to time being stolen from me. Time to spend with my children. Time to enjoy my life. He stole something from me (and millions of others) that no amount of money will give back to me.
Murder is a crime because you essentially steal a lifetime of time from someone. This man has stolen countless cumulative lifetimes of precious hours and minutes. The fact that he thumbed his nose at the law makes it worse.
If he rots in prison, I think it is fair. I want taken from him what he has taken from others, all of them. I want every minute of his time taken from him.
I want taken from him what he has taken from others, all of them.
Steals identity, exploits people's computers, pigs up the web with garbage, and (through identity theft) destroys people's lives.
Of yeah, let's just "slap his wrist" (again).
I personally would like to beat the snot out of him with his own computer.
Junk mail through the door?
The guy who doorsteps you?
The leafleters on the street.
All of these examples don't take up the kind of time spammers do. If the above examples were a) illegal and b) so clogging the streets and mailboxes so as to make it nearly impossible to function, than yeah, they would be as guilty as well. But they don't. They also don't come hawking sex, porn and pills (at least not here).
I could even tolerate spam if it were just a little, but spammers can't do just a little. It's not just a few seconds they take. It is hours and hours. Too much and they deserve to be punished for their excessive greed.
I could even tolerate spam if it were just a little, but spammers can't do just a little.
Look at some of the junk being sent these days. 95% of it makes no sense whatsoever in efforts to bypass spam filters. I look at some of this stuff and wonder what purpose it serves other than to clog the airways.
I just can't imagine there being any "large" returns on UBE, UCE, etc. Not in this day and age. What's the conversion rate? 1 in 250,000?
All of these examples don't take up the kind of time spammers do.
No, but what they are doing falls into the same category. I'd prefer that trees not get cut down so my mailbox can overfloweth with junk mail. On any given day, I'm dropping 2-3 unopened envelopes from banks, credit card offers, etc. right into the shredder. Yes, I do crisscut shred those puppies. No need to have my personal information floating about at the dump, no, not me!
Junk is junk!
