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The Family That Spams Together Stays Together

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tue Mar 16, 2004 08:09 AM
from the thats-just-bizarre dept.
Spam
Anonymous Coward writes "The Globe & Mail has a story about an Ontario, Canada man who is being sued, along with his father and brother, by Yahoo under the CAN-SPAM Act. The Yahoo suit claims that Eric Head, along with his father and brother, were sending out millions of spam emails per month, as well as compiling lists of email addresses to sell to other spammers. Eric's company, Gold Disk Canada Inc., gathered lists of email addresses and sold them for $29.99 for 100,000 email addresses on up to $1,599.99 for 10 million addresses."
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  • Was it really worth it... (Score:5, Funny)

    by cs02rm0 (654673) on Tuesday March 16 2004, @08:11AM (#8577278)
    ...I mean, we are talking Canadian dollars aren't we? :p

    • Re:Was it really worth it... (Score:5, Funny)

      by PacoTaco (577292) on Tuesday March 16 2004, @08:32AM (#8577428)
      It's not nice to joke about the size of someone's exchange rate. If you're not careful, some British guy will show up and starting making fun of you.

      • Re:Was it really worth it... (Score:4, Funny)

        by Schemat1c (464768) on Tuesday March 16 2004, @12:24PM (#8579697) Homepage
        It's not nice to joke about the size of someone's exchange rate. If you're not careful, some British guy will show up and starting making fun of you

        British man: Haw, you bloody Yanks! Our pound is worth more than your dollar. Bah haw, bah haw.

        1st American: What did that pasty face guy with bad teeth just say?

        2nd American: Don't mind him. He comes from some foggy little island country that still worships royalty. Now get into the Hummer 2, we have things to buy.
    • And i was going to until you spoilt it for me....

      Parent posting dude, check your exchange rates before you quip it man

  • You know what they say... (Score:3, Funny)

    by hookedup (630460) on Tuesday March 16 2004, @08:12AM (#8577282)
    Spam doesnt fall far from the spam tree.

  • Dupe (Score:5, Informative)

    by Gothmolly (148874) on Tuesday March 16 2004, @08:12AM (#8577287)
    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/12/172622 1&mode=thread&tid=111&tid=126

    Christ, its from yesterday even.

  • Oh god... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 16 2004, @08:14AM (#8577294)
    Please let one of them be called 'Richard'...
  • CAN-SPAM is not going to make a difference in the light that 40% of global e-mail is spam.. and a lot of it comes off American shores..

    Every little helps i guess..

    Simon.
    • I believe the madness is so intense that it recently rose to an estimated 60%. Say you send out a million spam emails. How many of those do you expect to reply? 30? 50? How many people are actually insane or rich (or both) enough to think "hey, actually, I'll have some of this v1@g|r..-A stuff"? Can it really be worth being a spammer, given the cash you have to lay out in the first place? OR is the idea these days to simply send as much e-mail as possible to no particular end? I know you have to spend mo

      • Re:Is this really going to make a difference? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 16 2004, @08:48AM (#8577532)
        All it takes is for a handful of people to respond to a spam with a purchase in order to make it worth it to spam, as long as you don't get sued and lose. Let's assume that you have a product that you spamvertise that costs $10 to make and ship, and for which you charge $20.

        If we assume that sending out a million emails costs $10, then if one person out of that million purchases the product, you're exactly even. If more than one responds, you've made money. Even if we were to assume that sending a million emails was to cost $2000, that's still just 200 responses to break even. Getting a response rate of 0.0001% to 0.02% and still breaking even is worth it in some people's minds.
        • All it takes is for a handful of people to respond to a spam with a purchase in order to make it worth it to spam,

          I keep hearing that, but I don't think it's true for the most part. I doubt that the spammers themselves are profiting from sales any more than your typical advertising agency gets a percentage of the profits from products they promote.

          No, spammers sell spam. They convince dense business owners that UCE is a great way to advertise on the cheap. Once they have that money, I don't think the

      • It's really not that much money. Most of the time, the spammers act as third-party advertisers - other companies hire them to send out advertisements for whatever crap they're selling at the moment. And when the spammer tells the company, "Oh yes, we can GUARANTEE that word of your company will reach over 200 million email inboxes," the company's eyes just turn into little dollar signs. That initial payment, combined with the low cost (it doesn't take that much effort to send emails, right? And lots of

    • Re:Is this really going to make a difference? (Score:4, Informative)

      by schon (31600) on Tuesday March 16 2004, @08:55AM (#8577570) Homepage
      a lot of it comes off American shores..

      Define "a lot".

      Most spam comes from INSIDE the US, not outside. [spamhaus.org]
      • And even IF it were true that most spammers were offshore, most retailers who employ spammers would be from inside the US because it's not cost-effective to charge customers for international shipping. So legislation isn't a dead-end with regards to spam, especially since there's a credit-card paper trail to follow.

  • Wrong. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gowen (141411) <gwowen@gmail.com> on Tuesday March 16 2004, @08:15AM (#8577300) Homepage Journal
    Ontario is in Canada. CAN-SPAM is a US act. This is Yahoo suing a spammer, the CAN-SPAM act is completely and utterly irrelevant.

    In fact, IIRC, the CAN-SPAM act specifically prohibits individuals / companies from taking legal action against alleged spammers.

    • Re:Wrong. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Eggplant62 (120514) on Tuesday March 16 2004, @08:31AM (#8577420)
      Ontario is in Canada. CAN-SPAM is a US act. This is Yahoo suing a spammer, the CAN-SPAM act is completely and utterly irrelevant.


      Being that these gents did business in the US by sending their spam to Yahoo addresses, they're fully culpable under US law. Same goes for any Canadian corporation doing business with the US: Fuck up and you'll be sued under the laws of the country where you fucked up.

      In fact, IIRC, the CAN-SPAM act specifically prohibits individuals / companies from taking legal action against alleged spammers.


      Seeing as how Yahoo is an internet service provider by the definition of the CANSPAM act, they're well within their rights to bring suit against the Heads.

      It's just too bad that there's not another brother named Richard to lend a comedic air to it all.

    • Re:Wrong. Wrong. (Score:5, Informative)

      by MacAndrew (463832) on Tuesday March 16 2004, @09:03AM (#8577614) Homepage
      CAN-SPAM applies, and of course US law has extraterritorial effect.

      As for our end of things, laws extend as far as the counstitution (due process) allows. On the foreign end, they may be *practical* problems such as getting physical custody (extradition), seizing assets, collecting evidence, but the US and Canada are on very good terms and have one of the most significant economic relationships in the world -- we can work it out. Also, if the defendants have violated the act and we can't reach them, they may still have reason to regret it -- and US assets might be forfeited and they might not want to visit. They can also be subject to suit in absentia -- if they refuse to show up on proper notice and jurdiction, they may lose their defenses.

      Jurisdiction derives from the domestic effects, you can't just hide on the other side of the border. The classic example is that if you shoot someone across the border, you are subject to the jurisdiction; yes this applies to fraud and other intangible offenses like the Nigerian scams. Again, the problems are practical. About CAN-SPAM. [gigalaw.com] The practical problems in enforcing it are HUGE, but clearly the theoretical jurisdiction exists. Also -- it seems a bit implausible to suppose that Yahoo's lawyers missed so many first-year law classes that they didn't catch any of this.

      As for who may sue -- the law in enforceable by the FTC, civil action by the states, and not individuals but ISP's (here, Yahoo):

      (f) ACTION BY PROVIDER OF INTERNET ACCESS SERVICE.--

      (1) ACTION AUTHORIZED.--A provider of Internet access service adversely affected by a violation of section 5 may bring a civil action in any district court of the United States with jurisdiction over the defendant, or in any other court of competent jurisdiction, to--

      (A) enjoin further violation by the defendant; or

      (B) recover damages in an amount equal to the greater of--

      (i) actual monetary loss incurred by the provider of Internet access service as a result of such violation; or

      (ii) the amount determined under paragraph (2).

      (2) STATUTORY DAMAGES.--

      (A) IN GENERAL.--For purposes of paragraph (1)(B)(ii), the amount determined under this paragraph is the amount calculated by multiplying the number of willful, knowing, or negligent violations by an amount, in the discretion of the court, of up to $10 (with each separately addressed unlawful message carried over the facilities of the provider of Internet access service or sent to an electronic mail address obtained from the provider of Internet access service in violation of section 5(b) treated as a separate violation). In determining the per-violation penalty under this subparagraph, the court shall take into account the degree of culpability, any history of prior such conduct, ability to pay, the extent of economic gain resulting from the violation, and such other matters as justice may require.

      (B) LIMITATION.--For any violation of section 5 (other than section 5(a)(1)), the amount determined under subparagraph (A) may not exceed $500,000, except that if the court finds that the defendant committed the violation willfully and knowingly, the court may increase the limitation established by this paragraph from $500,000 to an amount not to exceed $1,500,000.

      (3) ATTORNEY FEES.--In any action brought pursuant to paragraph (1), the court may, in its discretion, require an undertaking for the payment of the costs of such action, and assess reasonable costs, including reasonable attorneys' fees, against any party.

  • I wish natural selection works here.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Viceice (462967) on Tuesday March 16 2004, @08:16AM (#8577311)
    because this is one set of genes I'm sure we all don't want in our genepool..

    "ewww.. Spammer DNA... Gross!"

  • You gotta make a living somehow! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 16 2004, @08:16AM (#8577313)
    Oops! Look at that! I dropped a CD with 5,000 e-mail addresses! [homestarrunner.com] (Flash required)

  • i feel cheap (Score:5, Funny)

    by netfall (721323) on Tuesday March 16 2004, @08:16AM (#8577314)
    wow... i never realized how cheap the addresses were. i had always hoped my address would be like worth $1. I guess I should have hoped for a penny for my address. I feel so used.
  • 10 million addresses for 1500 bucks... why not just sell harvesting tools and avoid prosecution? I can't imagine a world where I'd see a CD with 10 million e-mails on it and think, "wow, what a great buy!" and not think "wow, 10 million illegal violations of privacy!" They should make unauthorized email address distribution fineable at $1000 per offense.

  • Privacy violation? (Score:5, Informative)

    by ogmiostech (753172) on Tuesday March 16 2004, @08:24AM (#8577371)
    The spammers are in Ontario you say? The spammers are SELLING personally identifiable information (e-mail addresses) you say? I'm not an expert...oh wait, I am...without the consent of the address owners, this guy is in clear violation of PIPEDA (the new, federal privacy act). Patrick
    • Is there a way to join a class action against these bozos? I live in Ontario and I'm sick and tired of my address being sold. I'd love to make an example of these buggers.

      Would it also not fall under copyright? I own the domain, and of course I also own my username (which happens to be my first initial and last name). Can I sue for infringement?

  • Related to Askslashdot: A Family IT/Tech Business (Score:3, Funny)

    by DaRat (678130) * on Tuesday March 16 2004, @08:26AM (#8577382)
    I wonder if they posted a reply to the recent Ask Slashdot question about "A Family IT/Tech Business" [slashdot.org]?

  • New offer! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dark Lord Seth (584963) on Tuesday March 16 2004, @08:31AM (#8577421) Journal

    NEARLY UNLIMITED EMAIL ADRESSES FOR FREE!

    Here's a small sample of our list!

    • *@localhost
    • *@127.0.0.1
    • *@127.0.0.2
    • *@127.0.0.3

    Order now! No satisfaction, NO REFUND!

  • Diluting spammer's harvested addresses (DDoP) (Score:4, Interesting)

    by G4from128k (686170) on Tuesday March 16 2004, @08:33AM (#8577439)
    If everyone who owned a website posted thousands of bogus email addresses, then spammers harvesting efforts would quickly become useless. It should not be too hard to litter the web with billions of false e-mail addresses on bot-finadable pages.

    The more enterprising site and mail server owners could even create semi-real bot email addresses that simply forward all emails to authorities. Even better, the mail server might first appear to "look at" spam by using an automated process to appear to fetching the coded JPGs that tell the spammer they have a live address. After the spammer thinks they have a good address, all further email would be sent directly to authorities.

    This could be a DDoP (Distributed Denial of Profits) attack on harvesters and spammer. By creating ten to a hundred times the number of bad addresses as good addresses, we could reduce profit per spam by a factor of ten to a hundred and create a massive stream of data samples for authorities to use to catch spammers.

    • Re:Diluting spammer's harvested addresses (DDoP) (Score:4, Insightful)

      by realmolo (574068) on Tuesday March 16 2004, @08:42AM (#8577489)
      Ummm...no.

      While the idea of having email addresses that simply forward all mail to authorities isn't a bad idea, the idea of the "DDoP" attack you mention is completely misguided.

      Spammers profit no matter how much mail they have to send, and no matter how many of those email addresses are bad. The bandwidth costs to send out hundreds of millions of emails is basically nil, compared to what they make back on sales to those poor people dumb enough to actually buy the products they're advertising.

      In other words, forcing spammers to send out MORE emails is going to accomplish nothing, except make them more money. They're sending out more emails ANYWAY for that very reason.
      • Spammers profit no matter how much mail they have to send, and no matter how many of those email addresses are bad. The bandwidth costs to send out hundreds of millions of emails is basically nil, compared to what they make back on sales to those poor people dumb enough to actually buy the products they're advertising.

        Not true. While, spammers do make money at very low rates of return, reducing the rate of return would hurt them. If spammers get 1/10 or 1/100 the number of clickthroughs, they will feel
    • erm... this is a really crap idea. Those emails still go somewhere. And when my mail servers go nuts because there full of mails that won't relay due to the fact they won't resolve, i'll be looking for legs to break.
    • You mean something like this [hostedscripts.com]?

      Or maybe something like this [armchairgenerals.com]?

      Loads and loads of bogus email addresses for the spam bots to eat. Eat that, Ralsky! :P

  • I met the guy (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 16 2004, @08:46AM (#8577516)
    Eric was a friend-of-a-friend who, according to my friend, had his own "business". Having heard rumours that he was spamming, and having met the guy, I'm not the least bit surprised. He and his high school friends used to run a site called me6 (which seems to be defunct now) that had video of them doing jackass type stuff.

    I do find it really neat to have met a spammer - I only regret that I didn't know it when I met him. I'm not violent, and don't condone that, but I would have loved to find some sort of ironic justice for him.

  • dee-luxe (Score:4, Funny)

    by neurocutie (677249) on Tuesday March 16 2004, @08:46AM (#8577520)

    "Eric's company, Gold Disk Canada Inc., gathered lists of email addresses and sold them for $29.99 for 100,000 email addresses on up to $1,599.99 for 10 million addresses."

    I'm kinda wondering whether my email addresses came in the cheapo $29.99 version, or if I qualified for the $1599.99 Deluxe package...
  • Time to get those catalog & magazine subscriptions filled out again. Has anybody figured out these guys snail mail address yet?

  • Fighting Spam is like Fighting Drugs (Score:4, Interesting)

    by myownkidney (761203) on Tuesday March 16 2004, @08:47AM (#8577527) Homepage
    The guys who send the spam emails, they are analogous to couriers in the drug trafficking world. Fighting them achieves nothing.

    The people you have to fight are the big bosses. In the case of Spam, the IDIOTS [mithuro.com] who try to sell their products and services through spamming. If more action is taken to prosecute these [deleted expletives], we will be able to combat spam better.

  • The Head family (Score:3, Funny)

    by sudotcsh (95997) on Tuesday March 16 2004, @08:59AM (#8577588)
    The Yahoo suit claims that Eric Head, along with his father and brother...

    Please tell me that they're named Dick Head and Shit Head so I can know that I've been yelling the right names at my computer screen this whole time.
  • Just wondering what a major spam offense gets you in punishment once proven guilty...

    Perhaps making them dig anything and everything they need out of a pile of useless shit for the rest of their lives is fair... you know 50 tv remotes but only one of them has batteries.. stuff like that all over their houses.
    • I wish it was confiscation of all hardware and never being allowed to touch a computer again. Add 5 years and $100,000 for each hijacked computer and it would be good.

      I'll settle for tying them to a tree and feeding them ex-lax for a month.

  • That's cheap! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Tokerat (150341) on Tuesday March 16 2004, @10:49AM (#8578530) Journal

    Strong bad gets $0.25 per e-mail [homestarrunner.com]! :-D

    Ugh, I think I broke my calvicus...majoras.

  • Come on boys and girls (Score:3, Funny)

    by CKW (409971) on Tuesday March 16 2004, @11:16AM (#8578846) Journal

    A ton of us are Canadian, let's go picket their homes and businesses (the security company they run), and visit all their neighbours and their security company's clients and hand out flyers.

    Maybe first we should get a friend in law enforcement to check the gun registry first, just to make sure that they don't have a stack of guns inside their front porch. And a criminal background check too, to make sure they're not the type that's "quick to anger and resort to violence".

    Shoot, I'd put in $100 to put a **big-ass** ad in the area paper with their pictures saying "SPAMMERS WHO LIVE IN KITCHENER" along with links to relevant documentation and excerpts. (I'd want to be sure that any such act was adequately *solid* - ala "the truth" is the best defence against defamation and the like...)
    • I say we go one further...not just the death penalty, but they die by being fed feet first into a wood chipper. That MAY server as a deterent.

    • Euh, what do you want to say with that figure? You are multiplying the price of 10 million addresses with the total spam e-mail per year. That would give you:

      $/address * SPAM/Year

      Which resolves to something like dollarspam per addressyear. What the hell is THAT?

    • 600 octillian, eh? (Score:5, Informative)

      by CausticPuppy (82139) on Tuesday March 16 2004, @08:53AM (#8577558) Homepage
      Wow, that's a lot.

      That's equivalent to every single person on the planet receiving over 3 trillion spams per second.

    • So you're telling me there are 6*10^29 spam messages sent out every year? The average year has 365.2425 days IIRC, which assuming no leap seconds means 31556952 seconds in a year. That works out to approximately 1.9*10^22 spam messages per second. The IPv4 address space has (far) fewer than 4294967296 available addresses. That means that each second, the average Internet-connected computer is sending out more than 4426865629872 spam messages. That's 4.4 trillion spam messages per second from every node on the network, including the billions that don't even exist.

      Which leaves me three questions:

      1. Where the fuck did you get that number?
      2. What innumerate moderator thought your post was informative?
      3. Are you karma whoring? (Seriously, I'm curious.)

    • Re:Whats Funny.. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 16 2004, @08:49AM (#8577537)
      Believe it or not, Canada and the US have a variety of agreements on cross-boarder enforcement. IANAL, but this is a civil matter, not a criminal one, so extradition isn't relevant.

      As I am sure all Americans know, you don't have to break a law to be sued. US businesses sue Canadian businesses all the time. I am from the Kitchener area myself, and the CBC legal analyst being interviewd said that Yahoo will have some legal hurdles, but will at the very least get them into court.
    • Did you know people do this sort of thing voluntarily [spamarama.com]? (Note the "spam cram" -- Hormel asked them to change the name to "The World Championship SPAM(R) Burger Eating Contest.") What if spam-lovers self-selected to be spammers? It's spamful.

      What's remarkable to me, given the examples of companies like Microsoft, Apple, Disney, etc., on trademark, is Hormel's fairly good humor about all these uses of its name such as this, UCE, Monty Python. Granted the slang use of spam would've gotten away from them no
      • provided no one publishes what they actually put in their product.

        Pork shoulder, ham, salt, water, sugar and sodium nitrate.

        Though no one's really sure that's all they put in it. As one of thousands of haikus on Spamhaiku [spamhaiku.com] goes:

        A worker threatened
        to tell what's in SPAM; now he
        sleeps with the fishes.

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