MySpace Wins $230 Million Judgment Against Sanford Wallace 160
smooth wombat writes "Apparently some people just don't take the hint. The latest story in the Sanford Wallace spamming saga is a $230 million verdict against Wallace and his partner, Walter Rines, when they failed to show up in court.
Wallace and Rines were accused by MySpace of creating their own accounts and taking over other accounts through phishing scams, and then using those accounts to send out bogus emails to other members. The emails sent would indicate a video or web site but when people would go to the link, the two would make money through the number of hits generated or they would try to sell something such as ring tones.
According to MySpace, the pair sent over 730,000 emails to members which resulted in bandwidth and delivery-related costs as well as complaints from hundreds of members. The 2003 CAN-SPAM Act allows MySpace to collect $100 per violation or triple that amount when the spam is sent 'willfully and knowingly.'"
Where in the world is Sanford Wallace? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Where in the world is Sanford Wallace? (Score:5, Funny)
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What's to stop him from starting over again if you don't find the actual guy and put him in jail?
Re:Where in the world is Sanford Wallace? (Score:5, Insightful)
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He's surfaced a few times only to piss people off all over again only to then disappear yet again. Could he have been in the Witness Protection program? Has "The Eraser" been hired to help make him disappear and allow him to start a new life
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> yet again.
Sounds like a pleasant life, doesn't it?
Couple of items (Score:2)
2) Spammers get nailed
3) MySpace wins
Just my initial thoughts.
Re:Couple of items (Score:5, Interesting)
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Aw, crap. (Score:2)
Re:Aw, crap. (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't worry, with only 730k mails, those guy probably made at most 5 grands, so there won't be much to collect, probably not enough to cover MySpace's fees. But the message is "get caught spamming and we'll make sure you'll have to file for bankrupcy", which is good because most of these guys are only interested in easy cash, so they'll think twice before risking their house.
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This is a court judgment. You can't get rid of it that way. If you could, everybody who lost a case would declare bankruptcy and get out of it, making it pointless to sue.
Re:Aw, crap. (Score:5, Insightful)
Spammers, however, reach out and touch me in ways I don't like to be touched. Kill 'em with fire.
Re:Aw, crap. (Score:5, Funny)
cf. "the mall"
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Nice, my unmodded comment about myspace got modded overrated.
I don't think it's the fact that you pointed out a flaw with MySpace - That's a valid complaint. But I think you misunderstood my post. MySpace spam is a good reason to avoid MySpace and go somewhere else, but open hostility is silly. Refusing to log in to MySpace is easy and it can be easily left to the people who find it valuable. Not enjoying it is fine - I was objecting to people badmouthing it as if it was hunting them down. YMMV.
The enemy of my enemy is my... (Score:2)
Friend or foe? This could get really interesting. Is it possible for a spammer to hurt myspace enough you'd pardon him for spamming? Is it possible for myspace to hurt spammers enough that you don't mind that it's myspace who's doing it? Personally I think spammers hurt society in general and me in particular more than any one website could and am curious what your situation might be that you've got such a vendetta against myspace.
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Plus I'm sure if he were really driven he could probably take Myspace out for a while with a co-ordinated physical explosion near their servers, and if he was good enough he could take out their backups too. Likewise several spammers have become well known, so he could try to assassinate one. Not very practical, but he cou
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Re:There's bad, and then there's worse (Score:4, Funny)
I hate spam, and last week I had ~1600 of them show up in my spam folders.
Yeah, which one am I going to focus on, which one indeed. Perhaps the one which follows me around offering me low cost answers to bulk up my penis. Never mind that if my penis were any larger it would take a genetically altered walking vagina to use.
Excite.com? I remember them! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Excite.com? I remember them! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Excite.com? I remember them! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Excite.com? I remember them! (Score:5, Informative)
That's OK. We all thought Sanford "Spamford" Wallace [wikipedia.org] and Walt "Picklejar" Rines were out of business as of ten years ago [news.com]. Those two motherfuckers (and I already have lawyers from the Oedipus Complex Anti-Defamation Leage calling on line one for my slur against people who fuck their mothers) have been spamming in one form or another since before excite.com even started. Here's a snapshot [keithlynch.net] of the spam wars, circa 2001. Look
Walt Rines' nickname of Pickle Jar [google.com] comes from news.admin.net-abuse.email, and he was dubbed thusly by one of the Elder Gods of Spamfighting, the immortal Bill Mattocks. The USENET thread to which I just linked was the one in which what had been widely known for some time was finally proven -- that every time a spammer says he's going to "remove you from his list", he's lying. (Following the FTC hearings, most of the major spammers of the day, including Spamford and Pickle Jar, were touting a "universal remove list" as the solution -- unbeknownst to the spammers, the list was seeded with never-used email addresses, and unsurprisingly, those never-used email addresses immediately started receiving spam.)
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I didn't.
He moved to spyware and got caught by the feds back in 2004. I don't believe he's ever left the spam business, he's just expanded into other bullshiat and started working a bit more at hiding.
He'll spam until he dies or they throw him in prison.
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Funny thing is that I can guarantee when Infospace bought the corpse they did at least migrate over not only people's email but all of their custom user/portal settings. Why? I just went back to "excite.com" after I don't know how many years and my personalized greeting still says, "Hello Chapter 11!"
Sanford's brother? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, MySpace sort of won (Score:4, Insightful)
Criminal investigation? (Score:5, Interesting)
You or me wouldn't be able to pressure the FBI to do that, but Myspace and Fox are big enough.
Throw them into federal prison for a few years and maybe they will stop.
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Yeah, lets let the corps run our country, we the people is overrated
The moral of the story here is that outside of the 1 in 1,000,000+ odds, you cannot get rich quick legally, and if you go the illegal route, that is fine, but the reason you are making the profit is because of the risk involved. Like the saying goes, if your not willing to do the time, don't do the crime.
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Re:Criminal investigation? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Way to go with totally ignoring the point of my response though. Well done.
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Nor do you have a clue what the FBI and federal prosecutors do. They are often involved in rather trivial, but interstate prosecutions. They also do in fact prosecute crimes that represent no real physical thread.
Death to Spammers! (Score:2)
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it's a pretty bad species that preys on its own.
Pfft.. name one species where the members wouldn't try to get away with something if they thought they could. Dogs always trying to get up on the sofa, for example. Most species would probably get all cannon-ballistic on their dead relatives as well. Some mothers even eat their live young. Meh. Sure some species have a pretty evolved social structure, but that won't mean they all stop trying to get ahead in that structure even if it means pushing someone else out of the way. The only thing that would stop
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Well, someone has to say it. Spammers serve no social good, and it's a pretty bad species that preys on its own.
Every species preys on its own. Every species has its deviants. Did you know that there are ants who will make alcohol, and they can actually imbibe it and be intoxicated, but if they are caught making it or using it they are killed? Did you know that baby eagles eat their nestmates if they hatch too much later? Did you know, you know, anything about animals, or the fact that we are some?
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frivolous (Score:2)
Certainly a spammer should have to pay for the traffic he cost and I can see that he should pay a multiple of the money he made from the spamming.
Even some kind of punitive damage seems in order since he willingly impacted another's business for personal gain.
But $230 million seems completely out of whack and unrelated to the damage inflicted. $300 dollars per spam seems excessive when the average return per spam mail probably lies far below $1.
But I guess in time
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Better for him, even at $230 million, to avoid the show.
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Re:frivolous (Score:4, Interesting)
Punative damages are designed to be excisive to prevent occurances in the first place. To be fair they got off light, the maximum charge of $300 per spam would put them at $2.2 billion.
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Triple damages: $73,000,000 x 3 = $230,000,000
This is what the summary states the settlement was for; I think you added a zero.
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Besides, when you factor in all of the time it took to investigate and track the spammers, plus all the development costs of spam filters, plus all the time deleting spam spent by those without good filters, plus th
Re:frivolous (Score:5, Insightful)
$300 dollars per spam seems excessive when the average return per spam mail probably lies far below $1.
And besides, these assholes are doing the same thing and worse in a variety of places. If you hit them hard enough on the ones you catch them doing hopefully they'll stop doing it elsewhere as well.
MySpace **IS** Spam... (Score:2)
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The large sum pretty much means that no matter how much money he makes between now and then he stands to lose all of it the moment he's found.
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it is the targeted marketing that you're braying about and not the social network itself, right?
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From His Blog (Score:4, Informative)
"I just read that a court awarded MySpace a $234 million dollar judgment against me. Thatâ(TM)s pretty amazing since I havenâ(TM)t even been served in this case since the preliminary injunction about a year ago. Regardless, the checkâ(TM)s in the mail."
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So he was served. What, he was expecting an engraved invitation to every court date? It doesn't work that way.
Regardless, the check's in the mail.
Oh I hope so, check fraud for that amount is a felony.
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This guy claims never to have been served with the paperwork for th
Judgment (Score:3, Informative)
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Sorry.
They can take our spam... (Score:5, Funny)
Courts are not the answer (Score:3, Insightful)
Note the contradictory statement FTA:
The judgment is a big victory for MySpace, although service providers often have a tough time collecting such awards.
I'd hazard a guess whatever MySpace collects it's still gonna end up costing them more in attorney fees than they could have spent on a technological solution.
Five years after CAN-SPAM and spam is at an all-time high. CAN-SPAM hasn't even made a dent.
The real problem with CAN-SPAM is that it's an extremely inefficient way of stopping something that could be accomplished more elegantly with technology.
Indeed, the reason my inbox isn't filled with spam is because of real-time black holes and filters, *not* because of CAN-SPAM.
If only the lawyers were programmers.
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I sincerely doubt that, at least, I doubt you're in the minority here. The CAN-SPAM act basically says that your corporate overlords CAN-SPAM you with impunity.
Five years after CAN-SPAM and spam is at an all-time high.
That's because it's a bad law. Had they actually outlawed unsolicited commercial email with jail time for spammers and financial remedies to Joe Public and his Windows box, it may have alleviated spam somewhat, or at least move
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Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't that an issue whenever you're collecting a settlement --be it an insurance payment, accident related, child support or whatever?
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I doubt it. The CAN-SPAM act was written by the spammers, for the spammers. It did exactly what it was designed to do. Anyone that is opposed to spam and has paid any attention is against the CAN-SPAM act.
Superbowl Halftime Show. (Score:4, Funny)
Don't just execute him. Make a game of it. Bring down the lucky fans who have their seats drawn or something along the lines, and give them lead weighted or steel footballs to throw at him. The one who delivers the death ball (could be the first guy if he's good enough) wins a Chevy truck.
During the world series, have a contest taking out his partner.
Then we need to get the rest of the world involved, I'm sure something could be done with the world cup. The Olympics? Well China has LOTS of spammers in their country, and they have no problem executing criminals either. I could see contest with discus, shot put, and javelins.
Make this the year of spammer carnage, see if we get much spam next year. We wouldn't even have to execute them all, just a few high profile ones at a few events and the others will chicken out. At least in Spamford Wallaces case his will be well earned.
Can you imagine the advertising revenue doing this would generate in the half time show? People would tune in just for the half time show, talk about a win/win situation.
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Fact is that Chevy only makes really really big trucks these days and they're gas hogs. People are looking for economy now and you almost can't give a way a big vehicle anymore. Now if they were to offer say a Toyota hybrid.... You'd have a full stadium and the ticket sales would be enough to not only pay for the costs incurred with the execution, but also the burial, stadium traffic control, pay off the city budget for the year, and drop a few billion off of the national debt!!!
what else
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Really... (Score:2)
They do take some hints... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Oh no, I'm on MySpace (Score:2)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6067 [mozilla.org]
Sadly not yet updated for the latest version of Firefox, but always amusing when you think you clicked on something important that turned out to be an Ivy-Leaguer's spring break pictures of a really stooopid drunken party.
What? No? Happens to me all the time...
You can also eliminate loads of timewasting (ie not on slashdot) a
Spamford Wallace! (Score:3, Interesting)
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However, she's probably the ONLY spammer you won't hear from again. Spamford Wallace, Alan Ralsky, Scott Richter, Michael Lindsay, are all names that will keep coming back. The fact that they're not all serving life in jail doing hard labour is proof that (a) the Can-Spam law doesn't work, and (b) countries have to start working together to castrate these SOBs.
As long as they're alive, they'll try to scam people. Internet spam is the 'ni
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Report the addresses please (Score:2, Funny)
There was no telephone listing for Wallace in the Las Vegas area, to which he moved in 2004 to pursue night club promotion work. Service was disconnected for two listed numbers for Rines in Stratham, N.H., his last known address; a third number in Stratham was unlisted.
How come someone (the reporter?) knows a third unlisted number, and apparently an address, and doesn't report it? I'm not having any luck in finding the case though public records. I'm not sure what I'd do with the info, but I'm sure it would get me in trouble.
Lart (Score:2)
LART That Pinhead! [userfriendly.org]
Spammers (Score:2)
Spamford & Pickle Jar (Score:2)
For some reason this picture [archive.org] just popped into my head.
Wow, Spamford is still alive? (Score:2)
I would have thought vigilantes had taken him out years ago. It's pretty amazing that he's still breathing; he's a long-time enemy of practically every person on the Internet. And don't tell me there aren't any crazy/violent people on the Internet.
Applicable Quotes (Score:2)
"REMAIN CALM" -- Afterburner; professional sysadmin and member of Subgenius Police, Usenet Tactical Units, Mobile (SPUTUM) who provided documented evidence used to sink Spamford and Picklejar's boat last time they got uppity. (Winner of the Golden Mallet award, as was Bill Mattocks).
"There Is No Cabal, and we will KICK ASS." -- Doug Mackall (dec. 1999); Cabal organizer and another Golden
Is a MySpace message really "email?" (Score:2)
SMTP by its nature is VERY vulnerable to abuse (false headers, having to accept and filter from unknown servers, etc.), so a law protecting it is reasonable.
This is similar in concept to fax-spam. Sure, you could build a fax machine that would only accept incoming calls from a "white list," but it would create as m
Still at it... (Score:2, Interesting)
Before UNH caught on, the school's entire email directory was publicly accessible. Obviously the work of Wallace, there were a bunch of spam emails poorly disguised to look like some girl's conversation about the club that she mistakenly forwarded to the whole school.
A minor victory over objectivism (Score:2)
Willfully and knowingly? (Score:2)
Let's cook the small fish, too! (Score:2)
On the news itself, wonderful. However, it's not enough to go after the big fish. We need to destroy the little spammers, too. Basically, the spammer sends out 100 or 1,000 spams hoping to find one sucker--but I think we could really hurt the spammers if we made it really easy for any of t
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The facts are that these people didn't show up in court, they really could care less what the courts do or say, and this guy likely will just move his stuff to off-shore to further obscure things. How do they intend to collect that large a sum of an award??? The law prohibits attaching any pensions or social security he might have. Any money he has gotten through all this is probably in swiss bank accounts and untouchable by the US. He's pretty much flipping the bird to the l
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> untouchable by the US.
This has not been true for many years.