Spammer Robert Soloway Arrested 383
Mike writes "Yahoo is reporting that US prosecutors captured Robert Soloway, a prolific Internet marketer responsible so much junk e-mail they called him "Spam King." Soloway was arrested in Seattle, Washington, a week after being indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of identity theft, money laundering, and mail, wire, and e-mail fraud. Soloway is accused of using botnets to disguise where e-mail originated and of forging return addresses of real people or businesses for his mass mailings. If convicted as charged, Soloway will face a maximum sentence of more than 65 years in prison and a fine of 250,000 dollars."
Is 65 years excessive? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is 65 years excessive? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Is 65 years excessive? (Score:1, Insightful)
Next question
Re:Is 65 years excessive? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope, not in the least. When you consider that he took over people's machines, used those machines to scam people, took their money and laundered it for his own use and forged other people's email addresses for the return addresses on his emails, thus having innocent people harassed, 65 years is a good start.
Solitary confinement with him only able to be out three hours a day would be a good thing. In fact, use his money the government wants to confiscate to pay for his incarceration. That way the taxpayers don't have to foot to the bill for this asshat.
Re:Is 65 years excessive? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Is 65 years excessive? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there a difference between stealing $50,000 from a bank, and stealing 1 cent from each of 5 million of the bank's customers? It's the same amount of money, and the same people are going to absorb the cost. But for some reason people think "1 cent per person isn't that much" and decide to let the spammer off easy. Just because the crime is distributed across many victims doesn't make it any less of a crime.
Re:give hima real punishment... (Score:5, Insightful)
However I believe that spamming should not be a crime. In the grand scheme of things... robbing someone is much worse.
Re:Is 65 years excessive? (Score:3, Insightful)
I hate spam as much as the next guy, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, sure...he did more then just spam. But even murderers often come off with less then 65 years, so is spam, impersonating people, using botnets, etc. *really* worse than murdering people?
People should get a grip.
I'm all for laws against spam and all the rest of it, but hell, 5 years + a considerable fine is more than enough.
Re:give hima real punishment... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sweet. I propose another arrest. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Is 65 years excessive? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes millions have people have been inconvenienced, and yes phenomenal amounts of bandwidth have been wasted (the costs of this have been mostly incurred by victims of the spammer).This is a white collar crime.
The spammer is not a danger to society, just a pain in the arse so an appropriate punishment is a small prison sentence, coupled with a phenomenal fine - e.g. 10 million dollars.
Get real, people (Score:5, Insightful)
Now is the time for him to get the short/pointy end of the stick...the stick that he sharpened and used on all of us. He took time away from each of us that we will never get back. Talking about fair this or fair that in terms of years behind bars....are you serious? Wake up. This guy leached your life and given the opportunity, he would not hesitate to do it again.
It is only fair to take his time away from him until he has no more.
Sentence is too severe. (Score:2, Insightful)
I hate spam as much as the next guy. That being said, 65 years in jail and a quarter million in fines (even assuming he gets half of that) is just too much. This is the sort of sentence you should impose on murderers, not electronic irritants who use a system designed specifically to allow anyone to said pretty much anything to whoever they please. In short: hurt him, but not too much.
Re:give hima real punishment... (Score:5, Insightful)
Bad analogy time (hey, this is Slashdot, after all...) - he's not breaking into your house and stealing all the electrical goods to sell at the local pawn shop. Instead, he's breaking into every single house in the whole neighbourhood while the owners are away at work, and using all the bedrooms to run his own private brothel, and then leaving the owners to clean up the mess.
Maybe his actions sit somewhere between robbery and fraud, but either way they are still most definitely criminal IMHO. Simply spamming (in the literal meaning of the word - "sending unsolicited email") should be a misdemeanor depending entirely on the volume of spam sent, and whether any of the email headers are fraudulent. Bot-farming, however, should be a felony.
Re:Sentence is too severe. (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree that 65 years would be overkill, but I'm sure this is the maximum penalty. Then again, it's important to make an example of this guy to remove the glamour from the prospect of becoming a new spam king.
In my opinion this guy should lose every penny he made from spam, should go to jail for 10 years, and be banned from using computers for life.
Re:give hima real punishment... (Score:5, Insightful)
Holy Crap you're a bleeding heart pussy!!!
Rehabilitation works only if there's remorse for a crime. The only thing he is aware of is the $$$ he makes. If he had to delete 20 billion spam then he might start getting a clue of just how much of a pain in the ass he is for doing his business the way he has. I would go further in that he should also be held accountable for the format/install of all those owned machines out there. And on top of that he's probably also responsible for a lot of people buying new computers under the false impression that they need to get a new one because the old one is slow. It's only slow because of his doings.
I have no interest in rehabilitation unless someone actually shows a sense of regret and remorse for their crimes. And even then there's a question of being real or just playing the therapists.
I do hope that if he's convicted that they have the sense to toss everything they have at him.
Re:Is 65 years excessive? (Score:4, Insightful)
Multiply that by 1 million people and you get an idea of the real damages due to this guy.
Re:I hate spam as much as the next guy, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem isn't that the punishment for non-murder crimes is too high, it's that all too often murderers get off without a life imprisonment or capital punishment. Especially if they manage to wheel and deal their way down to manslaughter or something similar.
Re:give hima real punishment... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:give hima real punishment... (Score:5, Insightful)
If I had mod points today I would give them to you...
spam will never go away, it's a multi billion dollar industry and people actually buy this stuff. So there's a very strong business case to keep it around. Capitalism...
The process of sending unsolicited email may or may not be something you can criminalize if the sender is accurately representing themselves in the email. However, the process of not removing someone from a mailing list upon their request can be considered harassment. I don't know if harassment is a misdemeanor or a felony. Probably depends on the degree. I'll assume for now it is not a felony.
But doing this under snake oil pretenses is a criminal intent. You hide your true identify by forge mail headers and trespassing onto other peoples computers.
The forgery should be treated as just exactly that -- forgery. I think this is considered a felony.
The invasion of someone elses computer should be treated as breaking and entering or theft. The economic value of the theft should be calculated on the cost of the machine being stolen. This would push most actions out of small claims/misdemeanors into felony court. So this too is a felony.
So there you have it, based on previously existing law. Spam is legal if accurately represented. Continuing to send Spam is a misdemeanor. Sending spam as a misrepresentation of yourself or through resources you do not have permission to use, is a felony. Is that so hard to work with?
Re:Is 65 years excessive? (Score:3, Insightful)
So if you're a rich, successful criminal, you should get off very lightly? $10 million may be a lot to thee and me, but is it to him?
And if he doesn't have $10 million, well, you can't get blood from a stone.
Re:I hate spam as much as the next guy, but... (Score:2, Insightful)
His crimes were well planned, and considered and over an extended period of time. He explicitly chose to do them.
They affected millions of people. OK, maybe it's difficult to quantify the damage, but if you think how much time, money and effort has been spent on fighting people like him (all those spam filter programs written and bought). There's also all the extra bandwidth used which has probably increased the costs of internet access for everyone to compensate. Never mind all the resources (electricity, time, Internet fees) that he stole from the people unwittingly on his botnets. Then there's the fraudulent nature of much of the spam as well.
If anything, I think the fine should be in the millions or tens of millions rather than quarter of a million, and possibly 30-40 years in prison, but it does need to be considerable. This wasn't just someone who misguidedly sent out a few spam messages one weekend - it's a calculating career spammer, fraudster and computer hijacker.
If nothing else, he should be used as an example, and he's got no-one else to blame but himself for it.
I have far more sympathy for someone who killed someone in a 'crime of passion' than for this man!
Re:Is 65 years excessive? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Is 65 years excessive? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:give hima real punishment... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:give hima real punishment... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:give hima real punishment... (Score:5, Insightful)
And more importantly, we should ask ourselves: What is the purpose of spam? It's to separate people from their money (either by selling something, by identity theft, or by fraud). Identity theft is actually worse than a one-time robbery. Fraud would be the same as robbing someone. The only case that couldn't be consider the same as or worse than robbery is the marketing of a legitimate item. Unfortunately, if you look at the techniques used by spammers to bypass spam filters and those market their wares on people who are clearly not interested, you have to assume that the product they are marketing is not worth a dime. In my book, tricking someone into buying something that isn't worth the money is the same as robbery. And for the spammer, it's not just one robbery. It's robbing everybody who "bites" the hook.
Consider the fact that the spammer *knows* that it's a crime (otherwise there would be little attempt to hide the origin of email). The spammer *knows* that almost nobody on his list wants to receive the email (otherwise there would be no need to use a botnet to bypass spam filters). The spammer *knows* (or ought to know) that it's illegal to compromise somebody's computer and use it against their will. So you have here a person who knows that it's illegal and socially unacceptable to do what they are doing, and that there will be severe punishment if they get caught. Yet despite the fact that they could count their winnings and move on, they continue to follow the path of a criminal.
Re:give hima real punishment... (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean, you get arrested for DUI(crime in which you put other lives at risk and you get a 23 days sentence) but for a non-violent, non-life threatning crime such and identity theft and spamming(the action of sending lots of emails(GOTO 10, you know, can't live without it)) you get 65 years + a fine.
Some law makers aren't thinking. On that note, I wish to recommend a more appropriate sentence : 65 years of first line tech support
-Hi, you have reached comcast tech support, my name is Paris, how can I help you?
-Hi m'am, the internet no work no more.
-OMG, what are we gonna do, like OMG, I'm so hot but people aren't gonna know no more z'OMG
Re:give hima real punishment... (Score:3, Insightful)
shit like this is why we have a huge prison population. there ARE other means of punishing this guy than locking him up for life (which I doubt will happen anyway). sentence him to work on antispam measures, sentence him to be a teacher in an inner city school, make him work it off.
Re:give hima real punishment... (Score:5, Insightful)
[1] I predict we'll see a drop off in pen1s 3nlargement!!1! emails after he spends some time in the prison showers...
If Spam is illegal then the Post Office should... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:give hima real punishment... (Score:2, Insightful)
This bozo has been spamming millions of messages a day, every day, for several years.
Sure, you could argue he's done nothing worse than maybe stealing a penny here, a penny there. However millions of pennies quickly adds up to several tens of thousands of dollars.
That doesn't include the countless hours people have spent manually deleting any spam that makes it through whatever filtering system they're using, the cost of the filter itself (some corps have easily spent $100k+ on their email filtering hardware/software)
Furthermore, it's not as if this bozo doesn't know his garbage is unwanted. Why else would he, and the other scum like him, spend so much time devising ways to defeat the filters and get his ads through? Hash busters, image-spam, haywyre encoded javascript, are just a few techniques that were clearly developed to slip through the filters and into users' email boxes.
65 years? Sounds about right to me. Knowing our screwy legal system, he'll probably end up barely spending 1 year in prison due to good behavior anyways.
Re:give hima real punishment... (Score:2, Insightful)
Do you have bars on your windows? No? Then it must be OK for me to break into your house. After all, I'm not commiting a crime here, otherwise you would have put appropriate countermeasures in place, right?
Oh, and excessive noise IS considered a crime. Don't believe me? Invite your local death metal band over to your place for an unbridled jam session at 3am, and see what your neighbors do. Well, it IS their fault after all. They could have installed better sound proofing on their houses, right?
Yeah...spoken like a true spammer.
Re:give hima real punishment... (Score:3, Insightful)
Like the 'real' sentences have stopped drug use and abuse as well as trafficking?
The US imprisons more people than the vast majority of the world's countries.
Nevermind the fact that it can cost us more to imprison someone than the monetary value of the damage he did.
Re:give hima real punishment... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not the best argument. I'm a technology-oriented person and am in very good shape. In fact, I'm a state boxing champ. So not all nerds are pasty, 98-pound weaklings.
Second, there is probably tremendous profit potential in dealing in spam. If there weren't, people like this wouldn't do it. What's six months or a few uncomfortable years in prison if you come out rich, and with rights to the TV movie and book?
Finally, you get someone who's already a criminal, and a pretty smart one at that, and throw him in the general population with other criminals. What do you think they're going to talk about there while he festers? Probably one of two things: Jesus or crime, and more probably talk about crime. Prison is like crime college featuring taxpayer-paid tuition, room and board.
Prison should be reserved for those who are out to physically harm others and cannot be loose. We should use community service and other society-beneficial practices to punish and rehabilitate those that commit nonviolent crimes.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)