Feds preparing to jail more spammers?

WASHINGTON--Spammers, beware: more criminal spam prosecutions--complete with stiff prison sentences and mandatory forfeiture of relevant valuables--are on the way in the coming months, a U.S. Department of Justice attorney said Thursday.

"I think the healthy dose of jail time plus lose-your-money is working," Mona Sedky Spivack, a trial attorney in the Justice Department's computer crime and intellectual property unit, said at the second day of a Federal Trade Commission spam summit here. "I hope that provides a deterrent effect to other would-be criminal spammers out there."

Justice Department and FBI representatives contacted by CNET News.com weren't able to provide any numbers on how many spam-related cases have already been prosecuted in recent years. The FTC's experience may offer one clue: a spokeswoman said her agency brought 26 civil actions against spammers since the 2003 passage of a controversial antispam law known as Can-Spam, and four of them also involved a criminal component.

It wasn't until January of this year that the department recorded its first criminal jury conviction under Can-Spam. That perpetrator of that phony e-mail scheme, a 45-year-old California man named Jeffrey Brett Goodin, was sentenced this June to 70 months in federal prison and ordered to pay more than $1 million in restitution to his victims, including Internet service provider Earthlink.

More recently, a federal jury in Arizona convicted two men on charges--some of which fell under Can-Spam--related to an international pornography spamming enterprise they operated a few years ago.

Prosecutors have also gone after spam-related misbehavior under more general federal computer crime laws and will continue to do so, Spivack said. She pointed to a recent FBI effort with the moniker "Operation Bot Roast," which included the arrest of a Seattle man accused of using a large botnet network to fire off tens of millions of unsolicited e-mails advertising his Web site.

But one "massive challenge" that remains in apprehending spammers and enforcing antispam rules is coordinating international investigations, said Robert Shaw, head of the cybersecurity arm of the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency composed of representatives from 91 nations.

"Even people who are experts at working in this space say they still have a really hard problem finding their counterparts in other countries and getting things done in real time," he said.

[onlyauser]

SPAMMERS MUST BE DELETED

I usually am not cheering for the government as of late but this is GREAT.

You go Feds!

[qwerty75]

What about snail mail spammers?

I get loads of junk mail through snail mail everyday.

Through common sense, I might have gotten 15 or so pieces of spam through email this entire year. That is a generous estimate.

Why not go after after both?

[Lee in San Diego]

Postage costs

Email spam costs a fraction of the postage for postal mail even with
bulk rates.

I do take the time to glance at my junk snail mail because it may
contain some good stuff like pizza coupons.

[good_nicks_taken]

snail mail spam

Snail mail spam is self limiting due to postage costs. The sender pays, not the recipient.

[johnericanderson]

Snail Mail Spammers

They pay for their own paper and postage.
Legit. Just like TV commercials. Legit.

They are not gaining unauthorized access to private computer systems and using your bandwidth and CPU time for free, to earn their money.

Cyber spammers steal processor time and bandwidth.
They also cripple computers and net connections.
They also cause undo hardship to the receivers and their mail servers, causing most of us to spend hours per day manually deleting spam.

[candlynn]

Spammers are stealing billions of hours

I advocate the public execution of spammers and virus writers. As a website and email provider, spam consumes huge amounts of valuable time and resources. Spammers are significantly affecting my business. They are stealing from me, my clients and my client's clients every day.

Many of my clients deal directly with the public so their email addresses are readily available and email communication is very important to their businesses. In highly competitive businesses where timely response is critical, spam is very, very costly. Anyone that has ever had to tab through a dozen spam messages on a portable device or missed an important email relegated to the bulk folder knows the high cost of spam.

Again, if spammers and virus writers were publically executed, I would cheer.

Life is way too precious and way too short to waste even minutes every day dealing spam and spam related problems.

[qwerty75]

Drama queen

Granted spammers are a huge hassle but somehow advocating the public murder of annoying people makes you better then the spammer?

[i_am_still_wade]

Won't work

Spam is still around because it works. If nobody clicked on any spam, ever, it would die. But, people are naive.

Spammers will just move to countries where the law hasn't caught up to technology yet. Jailing and fining some won't stop it.

[Lee in San Diego]

Block them?

From what I see most spam while it may be USA based comes
through off-shore servers. I don't have a need to email with anyone
outside of the USA so would be possible on the server level to block
email coming in from overseas? I understand that other people do
need to email with people outside the USA and it that case they can
use a different POP server or whatever.

[michaelo1966]

International Spammers

They should append the law to ban imports of goods or services from any foreign companies that hire or work with spammers in any way.

[Lee in San Diego]

Drugs?

A lot of the spam I see is for Canadian pharmacy and Chinese
penny stocks. I don't know if the person/persons ultimately
responsible for sending that spam is an American, maybe they are
Chinese-Canadians who now live in the USA, like Tommy Chong.

Boner and weight loss pills, Chinese fen stocks, and OEM software
make up most of the spam sent to my addresses. Recently I have
started seeing more "... has sent you an e-card" I don't know what
they are selling as I never click through or load the images.

[jatos]

that said....

That said, given enough pressure, I wouldn't put it past China to start doing just that!

Though myself, and not an advocate of public execution of spammers, tempting though it might be ;-)

[Lee in San Diego]

Well they executed that fellow this week

He was their Secretary of Agriculture or some such official
responsible for food safety oversight.

[jatos]

btw...

that was intended as reply to the public execution suggestion.