Oklahoma Man Wins $10 Mil Spam Battle

I have no sympathy for these Spammers.
Throw them all in jail and throw away the key.
There's enough junk on the Internet already.

I couldn't care less either.

I think the man should be put on DEATH ROW!!! Muhahaha!

"Though it's unlikely he'll see much of the money . . ."

Whatever happened to the concept of if you don't pay up you go to jail?

Thats only if your not an incorporate entity or a high level company executive....

If that were the case, every single Enron exec would be behind bars right now. [Insert your favorite prison cliche here]

While it's great that this guy is getting the smackdown of justice, I don't think this going to slow spam down that much. I definitely won't shed any tears seeing Soloway and his ilk cough up a lot of their ill-gotten dough.

Laws don't apply to corporations in this country. Even if the 'corporation' is convicted of a crime, there's no loss of liberty associated with the crime, so why should they care about the law? Corporations can't be jailed, can't get the death penalty, can't loose liberties, but they are given almost all the rights of a citizen. That's the root cause of the problem with corporations in this country.

Corporations should have NO rights relative to an individual. Executives and shareholders and employees of corporations should suffer punishments worse than citizens if they are convicted of any crime. The loss of money is NOT EQUAL to the loss of liberty. That's a problem.

Apparently you haven't read the Sarbaines-Oxley act of '03 (or maybe it was '02). Corporate misdeeds now equal jailtime for CEO.

Ever hear of Arthur Anderson? You should ask those folks if laws applies to them. Loss of Liberty? Ask Dennis Kozloski,Mark Swartz or Ebbers how they like that liberty from jail cell they are in. Ken Lay next up for a 6 x 8 cell.

Try getting a corporate conviction in China.

What jail cell?? Though sentenced, AFAIK, they are appealing their convictions and it's anyones guess when/if they will ever see a jail cell...

Wow. That's enlightened.

So, if your parents' 401(k) holds stock in such a criminal company, your parents should go to jail? After all, they're shareholders. Shareholders should go to jail because they allowed themselves to get ripped off?

Some line worker in Wyoming should go to jail because their whoring, coking, embezzling CEO drove the company into the ground?

Interesting world-view.

-tom

Don't be a twit, he obviously means voting-stock shareholders. Ones who have a say in the company rather than just being along for the ride.

quote:

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Whatever happened to the concept of if you don't pay up you go to jail?

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It's not the 1700's.

How are you supposed to repay the debt from jail where you are not working?

Here is a perfect example of how it is done. How can justice be served when criminals are given deals like this?

»www.wweek.com/story.php? ··· ory=5176

You can get paid a couple dollars a day in jail for doing things like cooking and laundry. It may take the rest of his life to pay off the debt, but that doesn't really bother me.

In some states the money you make doing work in prison is used to pay for your "rent" and food when you get out.

So you don't get any of that money.

License plate manufacturing...

This is a civil case, not a criminal case as I understand it even though I didn't RTFA. You don't go to jail when you lose a civil case. Just ask O.J. Simpson.

You used to is the 'old' days, it was called debtor prison.

...castrate him with a branding iron !!! Oh, and then hang him HIGH !!!

...uh, Taylor moved? That's a new IP.

Not to defend spamers in any way, but:

1. He did not receive a "$10M settlement." He received a "default judgement" which means that this thing has never been tried in a court of law, only that the defendant didn't show up. Two entirely different things.

2. The "corporate veil" is becoming increasingly penetrable. Often, principals of a corporation can be held liable for the debts of the corporation. The new BK laws are also contributing to this.

While spam is bad, it really is not much more than an annoyance, and I think that a $10M judgement is way out of line, and that OK law is a piece of toilet paper that should have never seen the light of day. Come on... $50K/day for an annoyance? I'd think that the OK legislature would have better things to do with it's time.

Oh? It's MUCH more than an annoyance:

quote:

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The cost of spam in terms of lost productivity has reached $21.58 billion annually, according to the 2004 National Technology Readiness Survey.

Messaging market-research firm Ferris Research expects to reveal similar, if slightly lower, figures soon. Analyst Richi Jennings projects the cost of spam in 2005 will come to $17 billion in the United States and $50 billion worldwide.
»www.informationweek.com/ ··· 59300834

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Gotta love how they massage their numbers, and then give you the basis to refute them in the next paragraph. Hell, the numbers don't even add up in the first place. 169.4M people * 3 minutes / 60 minutes an hr * 5 days a week = 42.35M hours a week, not 22.9 like claimed. You can make statistics say anything you want them to say. If spam is such a big deal, and causes so much lost productivity, then it should be incumbent on corporate America to control their networks, and not allow the spam in in the first place.I wonder how many productive hours are lost to drinking coffee? The truth is that if you get spam, it's because you asked for it. I get no spam what so ever. If that's due to Comcasts spam filter, or the fact that I don't give my true e-mail address out at all, I don't know, but if you are getting it, it's because you asked for it in one way or another.

"The truth is that if you get spam, it's because you asked for it."

This is an invalid and naïve comment. I can't begin to describe the number of E-mails that our servers reject because spammers are using random name generators trying to get a hit. When a new employee starts, it only takes a few days for SPAM to show up, even when they haven't used or know about the account yet.

Exactly. Your servers reject them, so the end user spends no time deleting them. An enlightened policy like this must make your life blissful.

...and you conveniently forget the part about the spam whizzing around costing bandwidth and storage. That's not yours, so it's free right?

Oh, wait.

Spoken like a true spammer.

And I suppose the innocent servers who were relay-raped and hijacked, the infected zombies that were taken advantage of, the obfuscated web sites "spamvertised" and bearing little or no whois info and the forged headers and From: email addresses are all accidental?

Fat chance.

The spam I get is to the valid whois info addresses for the domains under my control, obviously harvested by a spammer for the sole pupose of sending spam.

"Because I asked for it . . . "?

Get real.

And how many of the 169.4M people get spamed because of someone harvesting their whois info? Sure some spam comes from people using name generators and trying for hits, but I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority comes from people giving their e-mail addy to an unscrupulous web site, who then sells it. If RNGs were to blame for all the spam, how come I don't get any, having a pretty simple x@comcast.net address? Install a spam filter and quit crying.

If you're so sure of Comcast's filters, (aka Brightmail, aka Symantec) . . . post your email address.

lol, not a chance. That's the other side of the coin. By doing that, I'd be "asking for it."

You are such a moronic twit (there's another word I'd like to use but I'd get banned).
I get between 15 and 20 Spam Mails (in my Suspect Spam Folder) from places I didn't ask for. Most of it, corrupted BS stuff looking for a response so they can send me more.
That means it takes me 15-20 minutes each day to report it to Earthlink as Spam so it doesn't end up there again. Most of it has false headers. If I was asking for it, why would they need to use false headers? It's because they are criminals.
It's idiots like you that give the spammers a purpose in life.
For 99.99% of the rest of us, we would like to be left in peace.

Again, Why don't I get any spam? 0. Zip. Nada. Maybe I'm doing something right, and you are the moronic twit? Idiots like me give the spammers purpose? I don't see how that can be, seeing as how I don't get any spam... Control your info, or it will control you. Tool.

A judgement is a judgement is a judgement. The fact that he didn't show up, in our legal system, is the same as accepting the complaint as true. He was found guilty - period.How else do you stop spam? Slap them on the but like they did U.S. Bank when they fined them 1million dollars for selling customer information that they made 10 million on it?

Spam is NOT just an annoyance. It's apparent that you don't run an ISP do you? You think that every time a piece of email goes from one computer to another there isn't a cost associated wtih it? Do you think bandwidth is free? You think server disk space is free? You think that the labor costs in dealing with it is free? You think the software and hardware installed in place to deal with high volume email is free? You think spam is the smaller part of email messages flooding the internet today vs valid emails?

Annoyance? Think again. Also, the law is not worthless. You have to sting someone like a wasp to get them to stop and not just buzz around their face like a fly. SO I'd guess that in your view that it's ok that ISPs have to spend a large amount of money for an "annoyance" so that people can continue to abuse other people's resources. Like I said, it costs to transmit data over the internet.. the internet isn't free.

While I'll agree that spam is more than an annoyance to the operators of ISPs, it still is not more than an annoyance to the end user. Since spam does not discriminate against any ISP, at this point dealing with it has to be factored into the cost of doing business, and passed on the the end user. Again, it's only an annoyance to the end user, paying a few dollars more on their monthly bill.

Let me ask you this. If all spam was wiped out overnight, would my internet bill go down? Not bloody likely. You're right, I don't run an ISP, but I do run a business, and there are things that I feel are wrong that affect my operating costs. You know what I do? I suck it up or pass it on.

I started this topic by saying "Not to defend spammers," and that's not what I'm trying to do. I'm merely trying to point out that if you expect legislation like this to have any effect on the levels of spam, you are sadly mistaken. If you remove one, two others will take his place, and they'll be offshore, where the laws of the US have a hard time reaching. If you want effective laws on this, target the ISPs that host spammers, although you'll still run into the offshore problem. If you want really effective laws, get all the other wired nations on board, and enact some laws that have teeth. Good luck with that.

I once had a problem with the firmware in my Linksys that was causing it to send out a huge amount of e-mail traffic. My ISP notified me of the problem, and although it took me a while to find the problem, I did, and fixed it. They took the responsible approach, and told me that if I couldn't fix the problem they would shut me down. If all the domestic ISPs took this approach, then domestic spam would probably decrease dramatically.

Kills me. Sadly, this guy will again, start some other sham (if not already). Or has others doing his bidding. Do ISP sales/marketing reps care who they host?

What is worse are that ISPs are actually using spammers for income. And big ISPs. Why? well, there are tiers for bandwidth. Let's say that somehow, all spam was stopped. Spam accounts for as high as 60% of bandwidth on the net at times (email spam alone is 80% of email traffic). Well, ISPs pay a rate based on the amount of traffic. Low traffic means higher costs. Prorated. And if the spam isn't viral (trojan, worm...), its really harmless...to the ISP (well, not to the sysadmin or postmail...but he/she is their tool so..).

I just went through hell with an account at XO communications. Without much detail, (and since they are #5 on the spam ISP list) we were hosted by them. Then blocked by Comcast (ha!) due to a range of IPs being blacklisted (ours in that block) because a spammer uses their hosting. And still does. So comforting to know.

Anyone recommend a reliable ISP and voice services company?

Yep, I've read other threads here and there where some minion from the ISP confides that they're not gonna touch those account because it makes them money.

IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE WESTERN DISTRICT OF OKLAHOMA
ROBERT H. BRAVER, )
)
Plaintiff,
v. ) Case No.: CIV-05-210-T
)
NEWPORT INTERNET MARKETING )
CORPORATION, and )
ROBERT ALAN SOLOWAY,
Defendants. )
DEFAULT JUDGMENT AND PERMANENT INJUNCTION
STATEMENT OF FACTS
Pending before the Court is Plaintiff Robert H. Braver’s (Braver) Motion for Default
Judgment.

PDF: »www.mortgagespam.com/sol ··· y/19.pdf

Also . . . am interesting exchange in news.admin.net-abuse.email in which Robert Soloway shows up to "set the record straight".
»groups.google.com/group/ ··· 1b1af2ff