Spammer Gets $11 Billion Fine 478
Spad writes "It's not a typo, The Inquirer (amongst others) is reporting that an Iowa-based ISP has been awarded $11.2 billion in a case against spammer James McCalla, who was found guilty of sending over 280 million illegal spam emails. Under state law, the ISP was entitled to $10 per illegal e-mail sent. According to the Quad-City Times, McCalla has also been banned from using a computer for 3 years. From the article: "CIS acknowledged that it is unlikely to see any of the judgment money but said that it was time that spammers learnt that their actions would result in an economic death penalty"."
Re:Bankrupcy? (Score:5, Informative)
Nope, judgements and federally subsidized loans cannot be discharged by bankrupcy.
Re:Bankrupcy? (Score:2, Informative)
And yes, you can go bankrupt and not pay your debt, depending on the judgement of the court, but he will have to surrender everything* he owns.
R.I.P. (Score:2, Informative)
google cache of actual court document (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Guess they learnt their lesson! (Score:5, Informative)
These are alternative forms of the past tense and past participle of the verb learn. Learnt is more common in British English, and learned in American English. There are a number of verbs of this type (burn, dream, kneel, lean, leap, spell, spill, spoil etc.). They are all irregular verbs, and this is a part of their irregularity.
Now you learnt something else: Google is not an answer to everthing.
Not exactly... (Score:5, Informative)
The filing of either a Chapter Seven straight bankruptcy or Chapter
Thirteen debt adjustment immediately stops any lawsuits from being filed
or judgments being taken against you. If a law suit is pending at the
time of such filing, it can go no further. If a judgment has been
taken, its enforcement can go no further. If a creditor has a judgment
and is garnishing your wages, the garnishment can be stopped. Filing
for Chapter Seven straight bankruptcy may relieve you of the obligation
to pay the judgment. In a Chapter Thirteen debt adjustment, you may be
able to satisfy the judgment over a period not to exceed five years. If
the judgment has placed a lien on your home, that lien can be removed if
it interferes with your homestead. If lawsuits or judgments are a
threat or reality, the protection afforded under the bankruptcy laws may
be an appropriate solution for you."
It appears that in some states the law is a little different, but generally the answer is yes, you can file bankruptcy.
Re:About right, I guess (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Bankrupcy? (Score:4, Informative)
It looks like cancelling a loan as a gift is simply counted as a gift (incurring gift taxes) instead of straight income (as with an otherwise-forgiven loan). The first $11,000 is tax-free; the next $9,089,000 counts against the $1 million lifetime gift limit, and then gets gift-taxed.
RICO/IOCCA = 3x statuatory damages (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Bankrupcy? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Would love to see more of this (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not overly impressed with the spam filtering. I have MANY false negatives, and too many false positives.
I'd say I have 25 spams per day get through, about 100 that it filters correctly, and about 1 false positive per week.
But as you can see, I get a lot of email (webmaster for a large ecommerce site).
But, I still use it and like it. I ought to be better about training the spam, but marking the 25 emails as spam that get through is a chore. I use POP3 to read them in Thunderbird, and it catches most of them.
Re:Bankrupcy? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Through the ISP? (Score:3, Informative)
Was the illegal act the fact that the emails went through the network or that the spam had cis.net in the return address?
In other words was the issue that the spam was tying up CIS' network, or that the spammer was making them look bad by pretending to be one of their users?
Any thoughts?
I think neither, it's simily that the spam law, as written, forbids sending bulk commercial email with a 'deceptive' return address that wasn't the sender's. The return address could have just as well been public.com (bombed out of existence years ago by some spamware program having a hardcoded return address of friend@public.com) or example.com (the one domain name that's truly not available).
If this guy didn't have enough legal troubles, CIS can now sue for civil damages for the reasons you just gave.