Topic: Why aren't spammers locked away for life?

[Electric Eye]

IMHO, it should be a minimum of life, we could easily construe the damages in lost time and productivity as acts of terrorism.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070531/ap_on_hi_te/spam_arrest

P.S. Make that life at Maricopa tent city, he will forever regret the loss of his lifestyle and the mistakes that he made when he is wearing pink underwear and socks and eating bologna for the rest of his life! 

He continued his activities even after Microsoft won a $7 million civil judgment against him in 2005 and the operator of a small Internet service provider in Oklahoma won a $10 million judgment, prosecutors said.

  Well, duh, if you had him locked away with no internet access, he would never had returned to that gig. The U.S. is way too soft, here you only get a few years in club Fed if you rip off people or steal identities, in China they execute people for fraud. 

[Electric Eye]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/643607.stm

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007-01/11/content_780569.htm

http://www.startribune.com/722/story/1003960.html

[Just plain old Punisher]

..uh..because they haven't killed anyone?

[Electric Eye]

But that's just it Pun. Some people that murder or "accidentally" kill get to plea bargain down to manslaughter. A famous black woman (I forget her name, I only glance at hollyweird news) faces only one year and a 10k fine if convicted on the lesser charge. Yet, you do not have to kill people to hurt them for life. Think of all those middle income and poor people who believed the hype about World.com or Enron or even Dell to a much lesser extent? They lost EVERYTHING they had invested in their future.

What is our most valuable asset in today's society in America? Please do not say money, it only makes misery much more comfortable and is fleeting (Even though it seems to be the God of the 21st century, IMHO). Is it your car? Most cars devalue over time, unless you have a classic from the 50s or 60s. Is it your house? I've seen people lose houses and get right back in the game.

IMHO, today's society in America needs more TIME. We are so rushed in everything that we do that we have lost track of who we are. Couple that with two to three hours wasted idling in traffic if you live in a swelling urban area, well, you get the picture.

How many people have spent time, a lot of time when you add it up per person and then total the population of the world that has internet access, cleaning out "junk mail" and "spam" in our e-mail boxes and wondering WTF? I never gave it out to these agencies or companies. Well, this guy was living the life while zombie computers did his evil deeds for him.

This guy cost a LOT of people time and lost productivity. So, IMHO, he deserves life, as all his years left could not even begin to compensate us back for our lost time. Meanwhile, maybe others will think before they sit around making millions and millions and doing WTF they want while bufueing the rest of the world and laughing at us.

[Just plain old Punisher]

Uh huh...you're making it sound like he personally came over to your house and took a dump in your cherrios every morning after screwing your wife.

Look, I hate spam as much as the next bloke, but it doesn't compare to murder. Heck it doesn't even compare to drug dealing.

Eh the spam filters on my personal email do wonders...they pretty much get 99.9% of the spam.
My work email isn't accessable from the internet, so I never get spam there.

[Nemesis]

Sometime ago a Spammers home address was posted on Slashdot and the members signed him up for free catalogs and other free mailing lists.  Some apparently went so far as to buy him magazine subscriptions (to non mainstream sexually oriented magazines).  He had to dispose of hundreds of pounds of mail on a daily basis.  He didn't understand the poetic justice of this.  I thought it was a good way to illustrate the problems he causes.

[Electric Eye]

Exactly man. Plus one for giving us that info. I do not know about everyone else, but I like getting straight to the point, and yes, my time is my most valuable asset, as it's something that can never be recovered and allows me to get more things done, or when I relax I have much more of it to relax with, hehehehehehe.

[The Bar-Abbas Anomaly]

 
I have eliminated all spam from my personal Email (Comcast POP mail)...  Not just filtered it out where it still comes in but is deleted before I see it, either; I mean gone gone gone! - I just do not receive spam any more. (well, maybe one or two messages per week tops)

I did this with a combination of Mailwasher program from Firetrust ($25 registration fee with internet discount code) and the free Spamcop.net service.

Mailwasher allows me to view my mailbox out there in Comcast-Land before downloading messages to Outlook Express.  From there I can forward spam messages to Spamcop.net with only two clicks.  The only issue with the system is that I then had to go to the Spamcop.net web-site and submit each message individually.  Not time consuming, but I think most end-users would not bother with the two-step process...

Anyway, Spamcop.net then deals with the actual originating network of the spam, the ISP hosting that network, and whoever the 'money trail' in the spam points to and demands that they all cease and desist.  It didn't happen overnight, but I went from an average of 6 ~ 10 spam messages per day to about 1 per week.

It's a beautiful thing!

[Electric Eye]

Thanks big B!