AOL to Give Away Spammer's Porsche

A user writes "CNN is reporting that AOL is giving away a spammer's Porsche. As part of a settlement with a spammer, AOL took the spammer's Porsche Boxster S, and they're running a sweepstakes (already ended) to give the car away."

Late!

[awx]

Is this three or four weeks old now?

Remove this item

[sailboatfool]

and you will save diskspace from all
the useless posts.

THE AOL PR FORCE IS STRONG LUKE

[Anonymous Coward]

AOL are getting their Porsche $ back 100 times over with all this free publicity, perhaps spam is a good thing they are thinking ?

Unusual punishment?

[GillBates0]

Okay, this isn't exactly a punishment meted out by law enforcement authorities, but even then, isn't it unusual for a corporation to "sieze" a person's (albeit a spammer's) car?

Maybe he got a better deal by giving away his car rather than an equivalent amount in money - but how'd they reach the settlement amount? Had the spammer's actions caused enough damage to AOL to justify the $1million settlement claim? My guess would be that the spammer's actions cost them bandwidth and diskspace - but are they justified in charging him the amount just because their users didn't delete the junk soon enough or their filters are lame?

Not I'm justifying spam or spammers...but if they reach an out of court settlement for a million dollars, on the grounds that they won't pursue a lawsuit against him - it sounds an awful lot like extortion to me. I would like to see the damages of $1million justified in public - otherwise every crook company (we have plenty of them - RIAA/SCO/etc) could go around threatening people with lawsuits (which the individuals couldn't afford) and demand out-of-court settlements and the people being sued would have no choice but to pay up unless they had resources to pursue their case in court.

~The Essence of Slashdot~

[Freston Youseff]

Where it is "funny" to talk about shooting a spammer in the face, whereas you get Karma Kastrated for suggesting the same thing for a evil shitbag like Ralph Nader.

Why the Porsche you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Porsche was probably part of the liquidation of assets. If they guy didn't have enough hard cash to pay the settlement/award to AOL, AOL can then start liquidating his assets to get all the money they were awarded. I don't know who gets to choice which particular assets get "disposed" of, but I guess AOL worked with the government to just keep the Porsche as a Porsche and not convert it into cash. The spammer probably made out on the deal also, as I believe the cost of turning assets back to cash would have been charged to the spammer. So instead of converted the $40K Porcshe into $30K cash or whatever someone would have bought it for minus the cost of selling it, the spammer probably got the full 'value' out of it.

Re:Speaking of March 30th, let me just say...

[Halfbaked Plan]

Are you saying AOL is a legislative body or law enforcement agency?

That will be a scary day, incidentally. They own a big chunk of 'land' in cyberspace already...

Re:Old article - but it is an update

[LauraScudder]

I smelled bullshit rule. Check it out, license and licence [webster.com] are mearly variant spellings of the same word. There is no noun verb rule with them. I don't like the variant, since it makes much more sense to inflect license -> licensed than licence -> licensed.

Re:Hang on a minute

[Anonymous Coward]

They're not hypocrites. CDs cost money to send, emails through relays do not. Therefore, AOL is paying for their advertising while spammers are not.

Junk mail isn't illegal. Spam is. Junk faxes. Junk emails. Things where the spammers dont pay for the medium - where YOU pay for the medium - those're the ones that're just plain wrong.

Don't blur that line or you can have it used against you. Next thing you know, people think it's all the same and junk'll come with no recourse.