Spammer Scott Levine Convicted

bani writes "Spammer Scott Levine was convicted of massive data theft from Acxiom Corporation. Prosecutors say his company, the now-defunct Snipermail.com, stole 1.6 billion customer records from Acxiom and sold the data. He faces a maximum of 640 years in prison under the law, though he will likely be sentenced to far less. One spammer down, several million to go?"

Not Millions

[terrencefw]

According to the ROKSO list there's only really a hundred or so Levines and Richters out there. They are collectively responsible for a huge percentage of all the spam though. The rest is sent by amateur spammers sending to a few tens of thousands of people. The real spammers on the ROKSO list have databases of 1 billion + addresses.

"One spammer down, several million to go?"

[ciscoguy01]

"One spammer down, several million to go?"
According to spamhaus only about 200 individuals are responsible for nearly all the spam in the world. I know that seems incredible but they are in a position to know.

Re:Oh did he really?

[shark72]

"OK, quote some laws then, because that opinion looks a lot like bullshit to me."

You're losing your way by -- as many, many Slashdotters do -- ignoring colloquial use and making the assumption that a law book is the only valid source here. This argument falls down when you think of all the other colloquialisms that are out there: for example, no lawbook will contain the phrase "kiddy porn" but we all know what it means.

English is a great, big, colorful language. We have "stolen kisses," "stealing your thunder," "theft of service" (as in cable or satellite TV), "stealing third base" (a baseball term), to "steal the show", to "steal away", "that item was a real steal" (as in bargain) and countless other examples that would set the "something must be permanently deprived!" Slashdot crowd into a frantic buzz.

If you're using Firefox, you can type "dict steal" into the address bar for more information.

Re:Sentence? Just Hit Delete!

[drsquare]

64,000 hours, at 8 hours a day, is 40000 days, or 218 years, so you're not too far off the 640-year mark.

Your numbers are off. 64,000 hours at 16 hours a day is 4,000 days, or 11 years. That's a reasonable sentence. The work could be laying bricks in Siberia or digging irrigation ditches in the Sahara. Five minute water/food break at lunchtime. Perhaps a toilet break mid-afternoon.

Re:What happened to Axciom?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does one company have so much information on so many people?

That's misleading. The only reason Acxiom would have credit card numbers is because something like 13 out of the top 14 credit card companies are their customers. It's not Acxiom's data, that refers to the data of the credit card company being processed at Acxiom.

And it's Acxiom, for the record.

Re:Meanwhile...

[87C751]

Those relatively (!) few mails that reached actual people still wouldn't have caused them to lose 1 minute of their lives. How long does it take you to dismiss a mail as spam? Not more than a few seconds, maybe not even that.

According to my procmail stats, my filters drop, on average, 43 spams a day. (which is a bit down from a year ago, thankfully) Those that do leak through take, on average, just over a minute to inspect the headers, possibly tune SpamAssassin and move the item to the spam-learning folder.

From what I've read, I have it pretty easy. Many people get a lot more than 50 a day. The time loss goes up when you count the mental context switching. Without the filters, I'd lose about an hour a day. I bill clients $125/hr for doing real work. That's a loss of $45,625 in billable time per year. With the filters active, I only process about 7 a day, so I only lose around $5,300 in billables.

Just trying to help in making a reasonable guess about the lost time due to him.

Yeah, me too.