AT&T Tech Support 360Feds 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.
You go Feds!
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?
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.
Spammers will just move to countries where the law hasn't caught up to technology yet. Jailing and fining some won't stop it.
Though myself, and not an advocate of public execution of spammers, tempting though it might be