[quote=“Hobbes”]
Man gets nine years for spamming
I read that and thought “Wow, that’s a lot of prison time for sending out annoying emails, even if you send 10 million of them per day like this guy apparently did.” After reading the article, I would guess that the sentence was a result of massive fraud that the guy committed, and not just the spamming.
I wonder what the appropriate jail term would be for someone who was just sending the spam messages, and not selling fake products online as well? (Maybe the point is that nobody really does that – what would be the point?)[/quote]
9 years is a good stiff sentence, but for him it’s definitely not excessive as he was listed by the reputable Spamhaus organization as the world’s 8th most prolific spammer. According to your article, he pulled in US$24 million in sales using a stolen database of 84 million AOL e-mail addresses. I suspect he actually earned far more than that. For example, I read elswhere that in one month he received orders totalling almost $400,000 for fraudulent sales of a phony “FedEx refund processor” that was supposedly capable of earning people good money working from home.
Even if spammers didn’t commit fraud (which would be an incredibly rare exception, particularly with regard to the forging of header and routing info), people like the above criminal, who send billions of spam e-mails in violation of numerous state and federal laws, cause immense damages to countless people and entities.
In 2003, AOL reported blocking 2.4 billion spam e-mails per day, or 80 percent of all e-mails it received. In 2004, Microsoft blocked 3 billion spam messages per day aimed at Hotmail inboxes; spam-filtering company, FrontBridge Technologies, reported that 90% of the 3 billion messages it processes daily are spam; and the Radicati Group, an e-mail research company, estimated total spam volume on the Internet amounts to 35 billion messages per day.
This massive volume of spam is more than a mere annoyance; it results in enormous costs, consuming network bandwidth, computer memory and storage capacity, slowing data transfer speeds, clogging inboxes, delaying and preventing receipt of legitimate messages and resulting in enormous expenditures of time and money.
Recipients spend considerable time identifying, managing and deleting unwanted messages. Those who pay for the Internet based on time-spent end up paying for time spent managing spam. Many e-mail users are forced to spend time and money installing and maintaining filters or other