Receive Spam, Make Money! 275
Bud Dwyer writes "Wired is running the heartening story of Bennett Haselton, who was awarded $2000 from spammers under Washington state's anti-spam law. From the article: 'Spam fighters hope that if enough individuals take spammers to court, it could eventually drive the industry out of business. And, some savvy individuals could make some easy money along the way, and with a clear conscience, too.'"
Somebody Call a Class Action Attorney! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How about junk snail mail? (Score:3, Interesting)
Going After Spammers (Score:5, Interesting)
Some of you may like this
For a while now, my company has been in "hot pursuit" of spammers. Getting them for the message itself is mostly a grey area legally (the Washington state makes an exception), but using corporate resources without authorization is illegal. So we send them hefty invoices (for relay easily in the $500,000 range) and enforce them worldwide with the help of a collection agency, which adds 48% to the original cost to the spammer (we operate under the assumption that none will pay voluntarily, and all cases go through the full court process).
Currently there are $1.2m pending in courts, 90% in the US, the rest in Japan and Korea. And a vast majority has not even been invoiced (we have spent a ton of money on that already, but it does take time to research proper addresses to serve documents).
The goal is to get a few major judgements against the people who have their goods promoted this way (if we can collect on that, is another issue; and they can see if and how they can collect from the actual spammers). Once that is done, and press releases have been issued, we hope it sends strong enough a signal to spammers and their clients to stop it worldwide.
Any surplus beyond covering our costs will be donated to the EFF. Top EFF lawyers were very helpful in validating the legal approach. We are not looking to make a profit on this.
For more information see:
http://www.meliorinc.com/html/policies.html
[Why? We were shut down once too often by relay, at a time when we had to keep some servers open for special customers]
(I didn't remember my SlashDot login, and the password didn't arrive yet via e-mail - sorry for the "anonymous" sender address)
Thomas J. Ackermann
CEO
Melior, Inc.
Re:Ah nuts.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Radio Shack (not quite spam) (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyways, recently, Radio shack posted my home phone number as one of their local stores. I emailed them a couple weeks to change it and got no response, so I gave them a notice to remove it within 24 hours or I'd bill them the same amount (1250/10hours), to route their phone calls to the correct store.
I went to the store and they also have it listed on their reciepts and said they're having it listed in the phone book. They told me that they shipped in the notice to not print it in the phone book and were working on the reciept prints, but the website was up to corporate, so that's who I'm billing.
They have until 5:32 tonight to change the number on their website or they're getting a daily invoice.
I don't care if it works or not, I'd love the cash, but I'd love even more the phone to stop ringing off the hook, its worse than spam.
Tidbits did this too (Score:4, Interesting)
The article doesn't specify if Bennett has actually received money yet, or just a judgement. It's quite possible he won't see a dime.
Re:Laws shouldn't allow for suing spammers... (Score:5, Interesting)
Simply be creative in what you report.
"MAKE MONEY FAST": Report them to authorities not for spamming, but for fraud. Punishment is much harder.
"LOOK AT MY XXX SERVER!": Report them for sending pornographic material to children (spam will ALWAYS reach kids as well...) - at least in
Other spam: If you're running your own mail server, call it theft of service (your mail server's resources were abused against its terms of use -- therefore, it's theft of service).
I've actually tried the second variant on a major repeat spammer; the court hasn't come to a decision yet, though.
What does $5000 per day mean? (Score:2, Interesting)
(2) If the injury arises from the transmission of unsolicited bulk electronic mail, the injured person, other than an electronic mail service provider, may also recover attorneys' fees and costs, and may elect, in lieu of actual damages, to recover the lesser of ten dollars ($10.00) for each and every unsolicited bulk electronic mail message transmitted in violation of this section, or five thousand dollars ($5,000) per day. The injured person shall not have a cause of action against the electronic mail service provider that merely transmitted the unsolicited bulk electronic mail over its computer network.
Bothered by Spam? Blame Tolkien. (Score:1, Interesting)
EFF [eff.org] and Wired [wired.com] both give the party-line answer: the word derives from MUDs (Multi User Dungeons) of the late 80s to describe "unwanted stuff", and came from the Monty Python spam sketch [detritus.org].
The USENET posts I found, though, flesh out the story a little. The origin seems tied specifically to TinyMUD, written by Jim Aspnes [yale.edu], inspired partly by Zork [csd.uwo.ca] and earlier PDP-10/11 MUDs. TinyMUD was launched in August of 1989. TinyMUD's advantage over other MUDs was that visitors could not only wander around a dungeon (think "maze of twisty passages, all alike"), but they could also add new rooms and monsters on the fly.
Searching USENET, it seems there were two meanings of the term "spam". One definition was based on people abusing the ability to add new objects to the TinyMUD world:
For example, a delay of 5 to 10 seconds between object creations and logging in, will all do the trick of 'limiting' spamming without the juggling of quotas, login times, keeping track of hosts, et al.
However, the second meaning of the word, and the one that seemed to appear earlier in USENET, is the one that more closely resembles the meaning we use today:
Subject: Re: Word wrap [google.com]
Newsgroups: alt.mud
Date: 1990-01-22 23:18:55 PST
Right now my entire adventure is formatted to be easy-readable in 80 columns. This is also a pain, since 1) It takes much longer for me to write it, and I constantly feel a loss of artistic quality when I am forced to reword so that a line will fit; 2) People with wordwrap must turn it OFF, or the adventure will look like Spam. Bummer.
Other posts (and various MUD histories on the net) discuss the problem of MUD visitors who used various commands (most often the 'say' command) to fill other people's screens with unwanted text, thus scrolling more important things off the screen. The first place I found the word "spam" being applied to USENET posts themselves was here [google.com], related to a bot that accidentally regurgitated other posts in the news.admin.policy newsgroup.
Since most MUD Histories [apocalypse.org] attribute their rise to the fantasy genre of Tolkien (and to a lesser extent Dungeons and Dragons [tsr.com]), don't forget to thank Middle-Earth (and 25-line CRTs) for 'spam' when you see the movie [slashdot.org] next week. There are doubtless other etymologies; I'm just basing this on the only evidence I found.
As a side note, to Google employees the term "spam" refers not to unwanted email but rather to the underhanded tricks folks try to boost their search-engine rankings.
Re:Radio Shack (not quite spam) (Score:2, Interesting)
Hotmail spam (Score:3, Interesting)
- Freed
Re:How about junk snail mail? (Score:2, Interesting)
Untrue. Damn untrue.
The USPS started doing a study of that, some years back. The DMA got huffy about it and ran to Congress, who promptly passed a law forbidding the USPS from actually making an accurate study of which class of mail subsidizes which other classes.
I don't know why the DMA would be covering that up, unless they were worried that a 2001 1st-class stamp would be a quarter if they weren't around. If you can think of a perfectly innocent reason for them to seek a legally-mandated coverup, I'd like to know what it is.
ways to screw spammers (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.lenny.com/spam/