Replying to Spam at the Breaking Point: A Time for White Knights” by Gus Venditto
If you read the text of FTC’s settlement with Mr. Scott [referenced in the article], you’ll find Scott will pay a fine of $20,000 while getting to keep the $200,000+ in profits he made on the spam. Not a resounding victory, as you noted.
You might find this of interest: Hypertouch filed a class action lawsuit against a persistent spammer, Link It Software/AppSales, under California’s anti-spam law which provides for a $50 fine per message.
Our motivation is that class
actions protect everyone; all of our portion of any money recovered from the legal action will be donated to non-profit
organizations that provide the homeless and unemployed with computer office
skills training. We’ll need help in identifying and counting every spam
they have ever sent. The search strings for looking through email archives for relevant spam include: “Link It Software,” “appsales.net,” “Job Master,” “EZ Maintenance,”
and “wayne@xactmailer.net.” Details on how to forward examples are at our website.
Since they were sending through California ISP(s) which have anti-spam
AUP (acceptable use policies), it appears that every spam they sent out may have violated CA law
regardless of its destination.
number of emails.
Anyway thank you for the commentary. The more encouragement people have The ideas put forth already (opt-in, opt-out and the laughable efforts of what the FTC has done so far) will do nothing to stop spammers.
What is needed is law that makes the spammer lose access to customers. Block their phone numbers, web addresses and mailing addresses. You can have the post office put a block on delivery of all paper mail delivery to that address and have it seized, the Telcos (at least in the US) to suspend the phone number — or block all calls originating in the USA trying to dial to it — and have the net/ISP provider block the IP/URL address: all on the same day of detecting spam. We cannot control access in other countries but we can block all access to it from the US.
The law has to be written forcing the FTC to do this, funded by ISPs.
This attacks spammer at theirend — not end users. – Tom Philo, www.taphilo.com
on fighting spam, the sooner the tide will begin to turn or at least
slacken off a bit.
– Joe Wagner, Hypertouch, Inc.
Have a hefty $50,000 fine per occurrence. Permanently bar them from obtaining any 800 number (or any phone number) or web address after the third time.
