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.

Jailed more for fraud than spamming

[external400kdiskette]

I know it's nice to think some guy peddling generic viagra got put away for 6 years but this guy seems to have other serious issues:

"The 23-year-old was also convicted of threatening to destroy or damage property, concealing criminal property and fraudulent trading. "

It doesn't appear he was even charged with spamming, "Francis-Macrae was found guilty of two counts of fraudulent trading, one of concealing criminal property, two of making threats to kill, one charge of threatening to destroy or damage property and one count of blackmail. ".

And when he's making 100k pounds per week I doubt that many ppl are paying for junk, he prob was scamming somehow.

Domain Registry Of Europe

[hattig]

I think it was this guy.

He sent out fake renewal notices to people, using whois data. The notices asked for a renewal fee of around £60 for 2 years renewal.

I reported that company several times to trading standards, as my line of work was in the same area, and it was affecting my customers who would get in contact and ask about their renewal status, that they'd sent in the cheque a while ago... this happened dozens of times, and I was running a tiny internet company.

His response? He moved his company to a Mailboxes Etc (Regent Street, Cambridge, UK) that I also used, thus sullying my companies name. Mailboxes Etc were not interested in the fact that their customer was a scammer.

Any yet, stuffing ballot boxes...

[Colin Smith]

2 year sentence. Ahhh, the oldest democracy, nice to see we have our priorities spot on.

He's keeping the money?

[external400kdiskette]

"During the trial, Francis-Macrae defied Judge Nicholas Coleman QC by refusing to reveal where he hid up to £425,000, saying Cambridgeshire Police would "steal" it."

That'd be an outrage if he really ends up with all that, they should make a condition he never gets released unless he says where he hid the cash if he withdrew it or moves it all back into the UK if he transferred his profits offshore. Otherwise he should rot in jail forever.

Re:Appropriate jail-time for spammers

[nsasch]

A month? Spam costs corporations a lot of money, I can't estimate it though. If it takes you 1 minute to filter the spam out of your e-mail, and half a billion people have e-mail accounts, spammers are responsible for half a billion minutes per day. Time is money, and that's a lot of money. Spammers make foolish people on the internet lose their money as well.

I feel that spammers should get at least a year in prison. A second in jail for every e-mail sent sounds reasonable. If an e-mail takes a second to delete, even though it actually takes longer, the criminal is making up for his crime equally with the wasted time of the victims. If one spammer sends 1 million e-mails a day, that's 11 days per day of spam.