British Spammer Gets 6 Years

Killjoy_NL writes "The BBC tells us that a 23 year old spammer has been sentenced to 6 years in prison for sending spam and other illegal activities." From the article: "He had offered thousands of e-mail and website names when he had no right. And when victims complained, he threatened to destroy their internet systems by sending millions of spam e-mails. Peterborough Crown Court heard he also threatened to fire-bomb the headquarters of the county's trading standards department and petrol-bomb his local police headquarters. When internet policing group Nominet posted warnings about his activities, he responded by saying he would attack its servers." ZDNet has coverage as well.

Title Misleading

[mysqlrocks]

FTA

Peter Francis-Macrae, of St Neots, Cambs, was found guilty of threatening to kill and blackmail.

Yes, he was a spammer but that's not what he was sentenced for.

TheReg had it earlier...

[anonymo]

'Vindictive' UK spammer jailed for six years
http://www.theregister.com/2005/11/17/spammer_jail ed/ [theregister.com]

Good news!

It was the threats which sunk him

[Demerara]

It was the malevolence of his threats which sunk him.

Peterborough Crown Court heard he also threatened to fire-bomb the headquarters of the county's trading standards department and petrol-bomb his local police headquarters.

Just the spamming alone wouldn't have got him such a sentence.

Re:Speaking of spam...

[Requiem Aristos]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gondwanaland [wikipedia.org]

Apart from the incorrect spelling, Gondwanaland was one of two supercontinents resulting from the breakup of Pangaea. (The other was Laurasia.) It came into existence around 200 million years ago, then began to break up around 160 million years ago.

Nominet is not a policing organisation

[nicolaiplum]

Nominet is hardly a policing organisation. They are operate the registry for uk. and so I expect they got a lot of complaints about him and decided to warn other people.
Also his main crime was not spamming, but simple fraud: offering to sell that which he was not entitled to sell.
This is poor sub-editing even by Slashdot, and BBC technology, standards.

Re:Title Misleading

[sydb]

No, no, the other way round!!!

Title Not So Misleading

[tzot]

He's not a "terrorist". His actions were apparently not politically motivated.

Terrorists [reference.com] are not just those who terrorize for political reasons.

B (terrorists) is a superset of A (terrorists with political motives>, so for every x in A, x in B is implied; I believe we agree on that. What you just said is that x is not a member of A, therefore he isn't a member of B too, which logically is flawed.

What do you call someone who threats to bomb a building unless they are offered a large amount of money? Do they have to actually bomb the building to earn the title "terrorist"?

Re:Spammer/Thug/Asshole

[woluwedal]

'The correct term for him is "asshole", and while "spammer" implies that, he's expanding the range of activities for which he's an asshole.'

He's a brit, therefore the correct term is "arsehole" :0)