Judge Sentences Spammer to Nine Years

Associated Press ^ | April 8, 2005 | Matthew Barakat

[AntiGuv]

Shoulda given him the chair!

Guess the balding cure doesn't work after all...

[sitetest]

"A Virginia judge sentenced a spammer to nine years in prison Friday..."

Works for me.

[cripplecreek]

Don't suppose his new roomie will introduce him to a whole new kind of spam do you?

[thoughtomator]

Get the rope. Prison is too good for this kind of perp... a total sociopath. 10 million a day! When you add up all the moments of peoples' lives he stole, he's done as much damage as a mass murderer!

Just as a conservative estimate, if the average time wasted on one of his spams was 5 seconds per email, that's 578.7 days of other peoples' lives he was wasting every single day.

A rope is too good for this guy. Put a full clip in each knee, cut his hands off, and dump him in the desert to rot.

[traderrob6]

OUCH!

[hometoroost]

Not that I have any problem with sentencing spammers but that seems like more than people get for shooting people, molesting children, or sticking secret government papers down their pants taking them home and cutting them into ribbons.

Too bad he didn't do something even more serious like kick a dog or starve a cat to death then he would have gotten some serious time. Our law enforcement and judicial systems are a flaming mess right now.

[12 Gauge Mossberg]

It's a good thing he didn't smuggle illegal aliens into the country, or starved his wife to death. Then he'd really be in trouble.

[12 Gauge Mossberg]

Great minds....

[tfecw]

"16 high-speed lines, the kind of Internet capacity a 1,000-employee company would need. "

or that I dream about.


this is sort of a shady maneuver. I remember this story from a while back and there was a little more detail such as how much money he made as well as the tiny, yet important detail, that he was also the business behind the email. So he sent out mass amounts of spam as well as offered products for 50 bucks a pop and then never bothered to send and or they were bogus.

I'm not a fan of banning spam in general. Yes it sucks and i hate it, but spam blocking tech is a wonderful thing. What if FR or someone else wanted to use mass email (or spam) to get out a message. Hope they don't get to anyone in VA.

Then again, If i live in Texas but open my hotmail account in VA and get spam in my inbox, can the sender be charged under the VA No Spam Law?

[rdb3]

A rope is too good for this guy. Put a full clip in each knee, cut his hands off, and dump him in the desert to rot.

Wow. Did you work for Don Corleone or something?

Not that I disagree, mind you...

Leave the gun, take the canole.

[Unknown Freeper]

bump for later discussion

[DC Bound]

A rope is too good for this guy. Put a full clip in each knee, cut his hands off, and dump him in the desert to rot.

You get a lot of spam, don't you?

[Extremely Extreme Extremist]

9 years is way overboard, IMO. Fine the guy, maybe give him 6 months in jail or something.

This case simply reveals the fact that we've become a nation of crybabies. Apparently, the companies that the spammer targeted has never heard of anti-spam software.

[thoughtomator]

Actually I get less than most because I use a throwaway account for untrusted transactions. But I view spam as the equivalent of urinating on a million people at a time.

[FeeinTennessee]

I agree. The judicial system is a joke. I don't see why he has to serve 9rs. It's only spam, however annoying it is, 9yrs. is too much.

[ko_kyi]

This is where he starts to regret all those "Increas3 y0ur pen1s s1ze!!!" emails.

[Jeff Head]

"I can guarantee the court I will not be involved in the e-mail marketing business again."

Well, if he was bringing in $750,000 a month for quite some time as this article indicates, he will never have to do it again. Financially, he's set the day he walks free.

[sitetest]

Dear tfecw,

The law doesn't outright ban spam. It does outright ban the abuse of spam.

It requires mass e-mailers to maintain "do not contact" lists.

It makes it illegal to use forged e-mail addresses, making it difficult to filter out spam in certain ways.

Thus, there are folks who legitimately conduct the equivalent of "junk e-mail" operations. I've thought of using them for my own business. They aren't illegal.

But what this guy did was.

And I'm delighted that he'll do hard time for it.


sitetest

[DCPatriot]

I supposedly have the latest state-of-the-art spyware and anti-spam software...yet I STILL get 60 emails a day for prescription drugs, porn and mortgage offers.

Short of changing my email address, I don't know what can be done.

That said, 9 years is cruel and unusal punishment. 6 months should be the limit...or a hefty fine. Not both.

[lonevoice]

Not that I have any problem with sentencing spammers but that seems like more than people get for shooting people, molesting children, or sticking secret government papers down their pants taking them home and cutting them into ribbons.

I hate spammers. Who doesn't? But, I agree with your post. It's good to set a precedent and have this guy serve as an example. But, unless he had some particularly heinous priors, this sentence is over the top. If he's some kind of uber geek who's never served prison time, two or three years would be more than enough. I'd love to see some violent felons get a 9 year sentence for crimes that are far more serious than this!