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In the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Cleverlink Trading and its partners were ordered to pay $400,000 made from sending e-mail that offered the opportunity to "date lonely wives" and that violated nearly every provision of the Can-Spam Act, the FTC said in a statement on Thursday.
The Can-Spam Act requires that spam e-mail messages be labeled as ads, include the sender's postal address, provide an opt-out method, label sexually explicit material as such, and not show graphic sexual images in the initially viewable area of the message, among other things.
In another case, the FTC alleged that Zachary Kinion sent spam that advertised adult sites, mortgage rates and privacy software. It also said that Kinion paid others to send unsolicited e-mail messages and sent spam via so-called "zombie" computers without the knowledge of the PC owners.
Kinion was ordered by the Illinois court to pay $151,000, but the judgment was suspended because of his inability to pay, the FTC said.
Also in the Illinois court, Brian McMullen, doing business as BM Entertainment and B Pimp, was ordered to pay $24,193. The judgment was suspended for inability to pay, the FTC said. McMullen also pleaded guilty to criminal charges related to sending spam and unauthorized possession of access devices--credit cards--the agency said. He is awaiting sentencing on those charges.
In the fourth case, in U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona, William Dugger, Angelina Johnson and John Vitale were ordered to pay $8,000 for using "spam zombies" and not correctly labeling sexually explicit spam, the FTC said.
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People that take over other people's computers, for whatever reason, should be put in jail. It has nothing to do with spam. Spam here is only the circumstantial evidence shown to convince the court that a crime was commited. There's no need for anti-spam laws to put people in jail for "using other people's computers without permision". Does law enforcement require that a crime be committed using a car that is "used without permision" of the owner? Does law enfoecement require that money taken "without permision" would be used for some illegal purpose or is it sufficient the "taking without permision" sufficient to put a person in jail?
There are plenty of reasons to put spammers in jail that don't require any kind of specific "anti-spam" laws. Spammers steal resources, break into computers and computer networks and use them without permision. Spammers steal people's and organizations identities to avoid having to deal with the consequences of their actions. All these are classifiable into "classical" crimes of fraud, breking an enrty, and others...
Spammers create a lot of damage that is forseeable and can be estimated. What the legal system perhaps needs is to learn how to cope with damages that are fragmented into minute pieces, and learn how to punish criminals that cause very little measurable damage to each individual that aggregates and becomes huge damage to a collective of individuals. No one will put a person in jail for stealing a dime from another person. But an employee of a bank caught stealing just 10 cents from each individual customer's account will face several years in jail, even though no single individual was really hurt. The same legal logic can apply to many crimes commited over computer networks, and the legal system should learn how to apply this logic, because criminals have already learned how to apply it to avoid punishment.
I see that as a positive indication but must agree that jail time should have been included. As for using zombie PCs that could come from a separate court case but I suspect there's a difference in catching a guy using zombies and gathering all the evidence needed to convict them. They probably just figured they could get them for the spamming and didn't bother to go to the extra work of gathering the evidence to convict them for the zombies.
About $1.00 per day should do the trick of stopping SPAM at it's ankles... or more like... at it's toes!!!
Walt
Why not sell his pc/equipment at auction?
That'd be a start, anyway. Conster