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Spammers Fined A$5.5 million

Posted by Zonk on Fri Oct 27, 2006 08:11 AM
from the that's-a-lot-of-canned-pork dept.
Spam Government The Almighty Buck The Courts News
Mick Bailey writes "A Perth company and it's director have been issued a A$5.5 million (approx. US$4 million) fine for breaching anti-spam laws. Australian IT watchers may be familiar with the director, Robert Mansfield — he's been personally fined A$1 million for the offenses. The Company, Clarity1, sent 280 million unsolicited emails of which 74 million hit mailboxes between 4/2004 and 4/2006."
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  • Is it enough? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jmagar.com (67146) on Friday October 27 2006, @08:13AM (#16607820) Homepage
    I wonder if he's made enough money from the spam to cover this fine. It could turn out that this just becomes the cost of doing business...

    I prefer to see jail time for these guys.

    • Re:Is it enough? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by AoT (107216) on Friday October 27 2006, @08:19AM (#16607902) Homepage Journal
      I'm just happy that laws such as these have reduced the amount of spam I recieve.

      Oh, wait.

      Damnit, they haven't.

      Maybe someone needs to starts DOSing the sites that are advertised for in spam, then people would be afraid to go to spammers for advertising.
      • Give it some time, it takes a while for this to have an effect.

        Of course, the law needs to be passed in more countries.
      • Maybe someone needs to starts DOSing the sites that are advertised for in spam, then people would be afraid to go to spammers for advertising.
        you ever looked at the urls? they often use exploited legitimate sites to host the spam payload for this very reason.
      • Maybe someone needs to starts DOSing the sites that are advertised for in spam, then people would be afraid to go to spammers for advertising.

        Your post advocates a

        ( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (X) vigilante

        approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

        ( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest

    • Re:Is it enough? (Score:4, Funny)

      by uwnav (1009705) on Friday October 27 2006, @08:26AM (#16607958)
      YES! Jail! and the next time I seen them damn kids dropping flyers on my front porch.. I'll be waiting with my shotgun. Spam is annoying for me just as it is for the next person, but you still have to carry those flyers from the mailbox to the recycling bin (or put a recycling bin at my front door saying "Yes Flyers Please!") but that'd hardly the point.. I think jail-time would be somewhat extreme

      • YES! Jail! and the next time I seen them damn kids dropping flyers on my front porch.. I'll be waiting with my shotgun. Spam is annoying for me just as it is for the next person, but you still have to carry those flyers from the mailbox to the recycling bin (or put a recycling bin at my front door saying "Yes Flyers Please!") but that'd hardly the point.. I think jail-time would be somewhat extreme

        why exactly? running a spam filter costs me, the companies etc extra money in loss of CPU idle cycles. why sh

          • well I'm sure your spam filters are ringing up quite the electricity bill.. but I'm sure it takes him a lot more resources to send you that email than it does for you to block it. going back to my flyer example.. it's like saying you're ticked off at the work you have to put in to drag those flyers to the recycling bin (if you have any sort of conscience and dont just throw in the trash)..

            not true. back in the day we could run 20x the email, now we have to filter it and virus check... that reduces the amo

    • Jail time is a less effective deterrent for business crime because to many people, a year in prison is a lower price to pay than a million dollars. It is not too uncommon that fraudsters will try and earn serious amounts of money, hide them somewhere in Switzerland, and be rich after they leave prison, when noone is watching. Large fines mean they and their spending are being under close observation until everything is repaid (which may take a lifetime), so they are less likely to gain much from their crime
    • So in other slashdot news people get jail time for hosting torrents which impact a limited number of people/business.

      Yet, only fines for impacting a HUGE number of people/business??

    • I suppose if you make 20B$, knowing you are risking a 5B$ fine is just the cost of doing business, and if it means clearing 15B$ proffit in a few years, why wouldn't you?

      Lock them up instead. Fines are just business. Jail time is incentive to behave.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Jonny do good (1002498)
        "But you need to look at the other side of things too. Anti-spam companies are making a lot of money from spam too."

        Another cost that spammers should have to fund when they are caught. We shouldn't have to pay for anti-spam services, the spammers should.

  • Coming up next... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 27 2006, @08:20AM (#16607918)
    Coming up next: Spammer gets US court to order australia to stop interfering with his business, and tries to get them to order Icann to remove the .au TLD.

  • The gavel falls (Score:5, Informative)

    by Dekortage (697532) on Friday October 27 2006, @08:21AM (#16607926) Homepage

    The original court decision [austlii.edu.au] was handed down last April; this is the punishment. Additionally, when the case went to court in 2005, the courts handed Clarity1 an an injunction against sending more spam [acma.gov.au]. So it sounds like Mansfield first violated the law, then violated a court injunction.

    I wonder if he can pay the fine in e-mail promotion services?

  • I sort of read that "Fined A$$ Million" ala fined out the ass... *sigh*

  • Australian spammers (Score:5, Funny)

    by krell (896769) on Friday October 27 2006, @08:34AM (#16608072) Journal
    A fine for these guys is too easy. They should serve some sort of hard time, like in a prison or penal colony. Or imagine exiling them to a whole continent set aside to imprison them.... Oh wait.

    • Re:Australian spammers (Score:5, Insightful)

      by aussersterne (212916) on Friday October 27 2006, @08:50AM (#16608264) Homepage
      Put them to work in a special prison computer room where they have to filter SPAM out of government email boxes by hand, one click at a time, 10 hours/day. Every time they let a SPAM message through or accidentally can a good message, they get 24 hours in solitary confinement without food. No, make that they get 24 hours in solitary confinement and have to eat nothing but hunks of SPAM for the rest of the week.

      They should receive 1 year of time in prison doing this for every 1 year they were SPAMming on the outside.
    • like in a prison or penal colony

      Dude, this is Australia ...

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by 1u3hr (530656)
      A fine for these guys is too easy. They should serve some sort of hard time, like in a prison or penal colony.

      Oh, hilarious. An American making prison colony jokes about Australia. For us, that was 150 years ago. For you, it's Guantanamo Bay.

      • " For you, it's Guantanamo Bay."

        That will do as a stand-in for Australia in a pinch. All we have to is add a few roos, hang everyone from their feet so they are upside-down, and hire Mel Gibson as a prison guard.
    • Sentence them to live in a small town. As the old joke goes, every day in a small town feels like an eternity.
    • We have our very own island for that - it's called 'Tasmania'.

  • Hey, here's an idea.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by lottameez (816335) on Friday October 27 2006, @08:35AM (#16608084)
    Can someone please post his email? I'd like to send him some great money saving offers.

  • No Jail Time? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Greyfox (87712) on Friday October 27 2006, @08:45AM (#16608208) Homepage Journal
    Spam laws should mandate 1 second of jail time for every spam message sent. That's a half to a third of the time the average spam wastes for me.
      • Well if it takes on average 3 seconds to identify a spam by title and delete it without opening it this dude wasted 27 years of people's time. And that's not even counting people who opened the mail or the ones who actually responded to him. Nor does it take into consideration the resources used to store and forwar dhis mail. Odds are that when you add everything up the cost was well over one human lifespan. I'd say wasting 9 years of his time in return is letting him off easy.

        Of course we know that a leg

  • Why there are not box stuffing bots? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 140Mandak262Jamuna (970587) on Friday October 27 2006, @08:48AM (#16608240) Journal
    These spammers operate on ridiculously low cost for sending mail. Increasing the cost of sending email is neither viable nor desirable. The best option is to increase the cost of benefitting from replies. Only one in a million or two emails produce a prospect for the spammer right now. Just imagine some bots that reply to these spams with bogus phone numbers or credit card numbers. So he now gets 100 or 1000 replies for a million emails he/she is sending out. One or two, at the most, would be real b00bs replying and the rest would be bogus. Now the problem of filtering out bogus replies from real replies is on his end. Just increase the cost just a little. The bogus replies need not be impossible to spot. All we have to do is to increase the cost of processing replies. That will put a dent into spam ops.

    If some activists get some action from the credit card companies, phone companies and FBI and set up honeypot phone numbers, bank account, credit card numbers to trap the spammers at the point where they try to cash in, that would be nice.

    • Hello, I'm the son of General Nutumbo (retired) of the Nigerian Army. He was very happy to find out that thousands of honest Americans were willing to help him move his $43 million dollar oil renvenues out of the National Bank of Nigeria with their financial help. Now I find out it was all a trick. Shame on you!
    • Bad idea:
      1. Spammers never get replies. They send from botfarms with fake email addresses. Replying will either result in you getting back a postmaster "unknown user" message, or further clogging the email box of the poor sod whose email address they "borrowed".
      2. For this reason, business is never conducted by replying to spam - you either click a link, call a number or respond to a different address they provide in the message body. These would be harder to implement as anti-spam bots (especially the "call-a-n
    • Very few spams actually use a replay as a response. Usually they want you to visit a website and fills something out. How are you goign to automate that? What if the URL is in a image? What if they want you to call?

      -matthew
        • And this is supposed to accomplish what, exactly? What is this "central location" you are talking about? Sounds like it assumes a lot about the nature of the spam and the people doing the spamming.

          -matthew
    • Your post advocates a

      ( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (X) vigilante

      approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

      (X) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
      ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
      ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the mone
  • I have to admit that the number of emails surprised me. 74 million just doesn't seem like that much for a 2 year period. I'm not a spammer, but it just seems like they couldn't have been maxing out their pipe. I dunno. The spam business model confuses me a bit, anyway, but really, if I have a list of addresses that is, say, 1 million large (seems reasonable from what I've heard) that means they only send out 74 iterations over the span of 730 days. That's like less than one iteration a week. Does it t
  • A few stingray barbs to the heart and they'll think twice about spamming.
    • Your post advocates a

      ( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (X) vigilante

      approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

      ( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
      ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
      ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the mone

  • Summary is in error (Score:3, Informative)

    by The Famous Brett Wat (12688) on Friday October 27 2006, @01:23PM (#16612430) Homepage Journal
    It's WAYNE Mansfield. "Robert" is his middle name. I was one of the people who lodged a complaint and appeared as a witness in the case. The ACMA press release [acma.gov.au] on the matter is a pretty good resource. I have a blog entry [tfbw.com] on the subject which is short and to the point, and has useful links to other resources (like the ACMA press release).
  • Surprised nobody else caught this.

    A$5.5 Million.
    Ass.s Million.

    Sure it's a potty joke in l337 speak, which is why it surprises me that on a site of geeks we all missed it.

    • Just in case someone doesn't know, "nani" is Japanese for "what".

      And no, your pen15 will never get larger. You're a slashdotter who throws Japanese into sentences at random. It's not even going to matter. Get used to it.

      • It's NOT SO! BAKA!!!11!oneone
      • That's an in-joke in our office after we watched particularly dodgy anime. So, no, I'm not a slashdotter who 'throws Japanese into sentences at random'. I was stuck for a title so I just chucked it on.

        Oh, and I'll be sure to relay your pessimism regarding my sexual prospects to my boyfriend.

        P.S. Your screen name is paraphrased from a sci-fi film. People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
        • =) I was just messing with you.

          I'm actually a huge anime fan. And I'm a big dork about it. And I do throw in random Japanese words in conversation (mostly with other anime geeks). I never insult someone with the intent of making them feel bad.

          My name actually came from a flash animation someone made of me on a forum (my name is Donnie).But yeah, sorry that I didn't make it clear that I wasn't trying to offend you.

          And yes, I realize this is offtopic. Mods, mod me down.

    • You are assuming they went to High School in the first place :-)
    • Strange, the article mentions nothing about grammar.nazi.org.

      Were they indicted, also?
      • If I'm not mistaken, the editor was quoting something someone else said. They can't "quote" a reader if they edit what he wrote.

        You are mistaken. RTFA:

        Spam blitz: WA firm fined $5.5m
        AAP
        October 27, 2006 11:30am
        A PERTH company and its director has been fined $5.5 million for sending spam emails.

        ..the information was posted for ITS content, not ITS proper form.

        Yes, because it would obviously be impossible to do both. Why should someone who's pulling down a salary as an editor actually have to edit?

          • ...from the Slashdot post, NOT the article itself (There was nothing wrong with the "its" in the article). The Slashdot editors don't need to edit a user submission, even if the user mistyped something from the original article.

            Yes, editors DO need to edit submissions. I actually am an editor in real life, if I let crap like that get past me I'd be out of a job.

    • Out of curiosity, how come, when someone pleads guilty to copyright violation and gets sentenced with 5 months everybody complains that he didn't commit a "real crime" where anyone was harmed, yet finds it perfectly ok that a spammer gets fined such an exorbitant amount?

      Simple: the spammer is directly costing millions of people real time and money, and raking in huge piles of cash as a result. Many of us are responsible for maintaining mail servers and have to deal with complaints from end users about spa

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