Hello,

In the news in holland there was a message about a spammer.
The spammer got a fine of 250.000 Euro for sending 21 million spam mails
from the dutch telecom autority OPTA.
For each day he continius to send spam he will get a fine of 5000 Euro a day.

How is spam fined in your country?

Greetings,
Bertus

 

As far as I can tell, spam is fine in my country (U.S.). I am constantly getting email enticing me to increase the size of my male member, buy a Rolex watch, join Match.com (oddly enough, these are addressed to woolsy107), and a lot more.

 

From Spam Trackers:

Robert Soloway [USA] is a prolific spammer. His specialty is scanning through registries for contact email addresses, and accumulating them into a huge mailer database.<snip>

Despite his prosecution, $10 million fine, and a court injunction against further spamming [in 2007], the spam operation continued until mid 2008 when he was arrested, convicted and sentenced to imprisonment for nearly 4 years.

On reading some of the charges, it looks like mail fraud and contempt of court may be what got him into the slammer. Sometimes the only convictions that will stick to the biggest crooks are something relatively trivial, like mail fraud or income tax evasion (Al Capone, a famous gangster and murderer got convicted and went to jail for tax evasion).

I am not sure what laws we have in the US against spamming per se. Our First Amendment (Free Speech) protections are pretty powerful.

John

 

Hello,

In holland it is not allowed to send mails to a person without permission of that person.
They call it "opt-in".
Most providers in holland have spam filters installed.
I hardly get any spam at home. (I have three e-mail accounts).
I think the spam inside this forum is rather low.
The forum leaders take care that the spammers are kicked out.
( I am a moderator at a dutch forum that gets as much spam as here with 1/100 of the activity maximum 10 users online, most ever was 250 ).

Greetings,
Bertus

 

Hello,

In the news in holland there was a message about a spammer.
The spammer got a fine of 250.000 Euro for sending 21 million spam mails
from the dutch telecom autority OPTA.
For each day he continius to send spam he will get a fine of 5000 Euro a day.

How is spam fined in your country?

Greetings,
Bertus

Wonder how much a spammer makes per day...

 

I wish they would start fining spammers here in the U.S. Even my university email address gets spam these days!

 

42,they recruit them in university,I had a college guy that said he did it
in the Boston area. He was a world traveler with connections that are
hard tract.So you go overseas and make connections, some people
are not concerned about regulations. The american market place will
never return as you knew It. Global trade has venture trading money
that Is rooted In small business chains. Shopping centers,condo offices
world money connection.Your computer could be used for spam without
your permission.

 

Your computer could be used for spam without
your permission.

And some sites identify spammers by subscribing to a service that puts the spammers IP address on a blocking list.

When the infected user clears the problem, their IP can be removed from the list.

 

What is your government called,how does It work.Who makes the laws.

 

> I am not sure what laws we have in the US against
> spamming per se.

There is an anti-spam law ---- for more information, see the FTC webpage:

http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/business/ecommerce/bus61.shtm

> Our First Amendment (Free Speech) protections are pretty powerful.

The thing to note is that the law defines spam as unsolicited
commercial e-mails. While free speech applies to commercial
speech, it only goes so far in that case, so a spammer caught
soliciting watches to Mark44 is not likely to get too far pleading
the first amendment.

> Your computer could be used for spam without
> your permission.

Setting a tight firewall and avoiding programs which you
suspect have trapdoors (or, at least running them under
a separate account with minimal permissions) should go
a long way to keeping this from happening if not make it
virtually impossible. The problem I've run into is not that
someone got into my computer, but that the spammer
got into my free web e-mail account (or impersonated me).
Fortunately, the problem got straightened out pretty
quickly by the web e-mail company.

 

@rspuzio

Thanks for the FTC link. Unfortunately, it does not seem to be enforced too rigorously, and it is hard to catch them. I wonder if one could sue under qui tam? All spammers need is to claim a "business relationship," which is all too easy to establish -- even if you don't know it is being done. Have you gotten your "final notice auto warranty" or the $1000 coupon at XXX store today yet? Also, just like the "do not call list," I suspect there are a lot of exceptions.

John