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Spam King Pleads Guilty in Seattle
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Mar 15, 2008 10:44 PM
from the why-would-you-want-to-be-king-of-that dept.
from the why-would-you-want-to-be-king-of-that dept.
arbitraryaardvark writes "The Seattle Times reports that spammer Robert Soloway has pled guilty to mail fraud and tax evasion, in exchange for the state dropping multiple counts of identify theft. 'The electronic-mail fraud charge is punishable by up to five years in prison. The tax charge is a misdemeanor and carries a maximum one-year sentence. The law also allows for fines against Soloway and his business of up to $625,000 on all charges. Both sides agreed to let U.S. District Court Judge Marsha Pechman determine not just the amount of prison time Soloway, 28, might serve but also the number of his victims, the size of any fine and the amount of restitution he may be ordered to pay.' We've previously discussed his arrest and mention in the New Yorker. The wire fraud felony count is based on selling $500 packages to wannabe spammers."
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IT: Spammer Robert Soloway Arrested 383 comments
Mike writes "Yahoo is reporting that US prosecutors captured Robert Soloway, a prolific Internet marketer responsible so much junk e-mail they called him "Spam King." Soloway was arrested in Seattle, Washington, a week after being indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of identity theft, money laundering, and mail, wire, and e-mail fraud. Soloway is accused of using botnets to disguise where e-mail originated and of forging return addresses of real people or businesses for his mass mailings. If convicted as charged, Soloway will face a maximum sentence of more than 65 years in prison and a fine of 250,000 dollars."
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IT: The New Yorker On Spam 132 comments
aqk notes an article in the Aug. 6th New Yorker surveying the spam problem up-to-date. The New Yorker may not be exactly the MSM, but it is pretty influential. The author got only one fact wrong that I noticed: Canter and Siegel's seminal spam was propagated through Usenet and not email. Still, it's a good look at the history of spam and the scale of the problem today. The amount of spam that "spam king" Robert Alan Soloway, indicted under the CAN-SPAM Act, is accused of sending over a period of four years is now pumped out about every 30 seconds, around the clock, around the world.
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For sending too much email? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I don't actually. But TFA mentioned how the Washington ID theft statute had never been used in that way before. In my original draft of the summary I described the ID charges as "iffy".
The deal is for potentially a lot of jail time. Fines and restitution don't matter much because he's sheltered all his assets after having gotten sued by Microsoft. 90% of criminal charges are resolved with plea bargains, and that usually involves dropping most charges
Re:For sending too much email? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:For sending too much email? (Score:5, Funny)
(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. your idea will not work. here is why it won't work. (one or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) no one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) it is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) it will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) users of email will not put up with it
( ) microsoft will not put up with it
( ) the police will not put up with it
( ) requires too much cooperation from spammers
(X) requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) open relays in foreign countries
( ) ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) asshats
( ) jurisdictional problems
( ) unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(X) huge existing software investment in smtp
(X) susceptibility of protocols other than smtp to attack
(X) willingness of users to install os patches received by email
( ) armies of worm riddled broadband-connected windows boxes
( ) eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) extreme profitability of spam
( ) joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) technically illiterate politicians
( ) extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) outlook
(X) botnets
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
(X) any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) smtp headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) blacklists suck
( ) whitelists suck
( ) we should be able to talk about viagra without being censored
( ) countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) sending email should be free
( ) why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) i don't want the government reading my email
( ) killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
furthermore, this is what i think about you:
(X) sorry dude, but i don't think it would work.
( ) this is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) nice try, assh0le! i'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
It goes simply like this - As the spam volumes keep on climbing and climbing and ever-decreasing volume of email is actually legitimate, "huge investment in SMTP infrastructure" becomes slowly more of a liability than asset.
You already need heavy-duty spam filtering SOMEWHERE to be able to use business email. I just realized some of my colleagues "just hit delete" on something like 50 emails per day because they lack the know-how to make simple thunderbird/outlook filter
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's go through it
(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
What other way will there be of blocking spam? Legislative won't work because there is no one governing body that controls the entire world and can punish those that do wrong.
Market based...well, it might work, but the solution will probable be some sort of technical device like a barracuda appliance.
Vigilante would work if we just shot all the spammers, but then those people would go to jail for mur
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It fails because your Aunt Mathilda doesn't know the first thing about email encryption, nor does she care. Businesses won't mandate its use with the buying public because most of those customers will go somewhere else instead of changing their email habits. "Public keys? How does a key protect anything if it is public?" "Cryptographic signature verification?" Good luck explaining that the John and Jane Public.
I don't expect to see widespread use of email signing (or encryption
Re:For sending too much email? (Score:4, Insightful)
And you guarantee inclusion of legit traffic from mobile sources, how? You don't know what IP address or ISP will be used. What about legit mailing lists, where the originator is indeterminate?
X.400 provides much better authentication, and offers an API for repudiation, but if that's what people really wanted, we'd be using it. Or maybe everyone would use SMTP-over-SSL where client-side and server-side certificates were validated. We don't use them because people need the privacy, anonymity and flexibility of the existing system, although I'd argue almost anything is technically superior to the existing system.
In the end, although a totally secure option should exist, an insecure option should also exist that is controlled by policy rather than technology, and that ultimately means laws.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
The "real charges" are based on which charges are politically most popular and Spam is charge that raises the most ire.
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You sound liek a spammer to me. If you are I really do hope you go to a federal recreation facility and room with a guy named "Buba" who really likes you.
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You don't know a whole lot about how email actually works, do you? Yes, it's a pain in the ass. You sound like you're having more problems with it than a couple state universities I know of though. Read up on the RFC's and learn how to get rid of most of your spam rather than go 'Chicken Little' will ya?
I don't know whether you understand how e-mail works, but you certainly don't appear to understand spam at all. Sure, of course familiarizing yourself with the SMTP RFCs is a good first step, but since most spam is RFC compliant, where does that get you? If you're not 1) spending a lot of time working on blocking spam, 2) spending a lot of money on blocking spam, or 3) letting someone else spend a lot of time or money to block spam for you, then your e-mail address just hasn't gotten distributed to very
Re:For sending too much email? (Score:4, Insightful)
And yet, oddly, junk faxes are illegal, because they cause a significant amount of cost for the receiver. Just like junk email does.
The law won't [i]fix[/i] things, of course. Junk faxing still occurs. But it might help, if it's designed properly.
Parent
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Spam these days is nothing more then a denial of service attack on the SMTP network and should be punished as such. Just because it is on open system doesn't mean abuse shouldn't be punished, quite the opposite actually, since it is an option system abuse must be punished, since it is the only way to get rid of it.
The days where it was easy to filter it out by hand and spam was just
I hope... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I hope... (Score:5, Insightful)
Your comedic take is about as funny as the drunk guy I saw yesterday that said "Ooops, you just knocked over your home" when he walked past a homeless guy that dropped a cardboard box yesterday.
Parent
No, correction..... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The rules he's charged under suck (Score:4, Interesting)
Best Seattle Sentence (Score:2)
Calm down! (Score:5, Insightful)
a) move to a country with Sharia law
b) save it for the worst offenders, those that actually murder others, like some US states do
c) grow up. At worst he's annoyed you, and maybe cost you a bit of time or money.
just a hunch... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
In which case the most appropriate US prison for him would probably be Camp X-Ray.
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The filters arn't free either
Times that by all the computer users affected and it's a massive loss of time.
In the process making email a much less useful communication tool. Especially if someone misses real email in amongst all the spam or the spammers attempts to evade filtering mean that legitimate email winds up being filtered.
Why should we loose millions of hours a week so he can hawk crap no one needs and 99% never respond to, h
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Calm down! (Score:5, Insightful)
For the people advocating death/rape for this guy: just wait until you are falsely imprisoned, or simply imprisoned for a minor infraction such as telling your mind verbally to someone who turns out to be on the 'good' side of the law. It happens very frequently in this country. And non zero odds that it will happen to you as well.
To everyone else: don't get me wrong, I'm not at all saying Soloway is innocent and should not be punished for his crimes. Just that wishing cruel and unusual punishments on him, which sadly are highly likely to happen to anyone that ends up in jail or prison, will also be forced on a small part of the innocent population as well, and that it's never right.
I also don't feel stupidity should be punished with nightly beatings, rape, disfigurement, torture, and potentially murder in the prison system either, despite the fact that the people wishing these things on others will probably never learn just how stupid such desires are until it happens to them.
But I sure do wish there was less stupid people in the world, such as those that cheer for this sort of treatment.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
His company made at least $300,000 last year at $495 a shot - so he sold at least 606 of his packages in a year. With a package lasting 15 days it means he had to sell 24.3 packages to cover 20,000,000 people for one year (since he also sold email addresses and the cumulative effect of that would cover enough to hit the 20 min/month ratio) that means he could cover 500 million people/addresses in a year. W
Re: (Score:2)
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w00t!
I don't think w00t! is the appropriate response as FTA:
One thing is clear from the plea agreement: Soloway does not have a lot of assets for the government to seize. Among the items Pechman will be asked to consider for forfeiture are Soloway's collection of 24 pairs of sunglasses, valued at more than $3,700; 27 pairs of shoes, worth more than $7,400; and clothing worth about $14,200.
HAHA! seems much more appropriate... Even though the guy apparently dresses nicer then I do by leaps and bounds.
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Re: (Score:2)
Also, just about any other system would have problems worse than spam -- but it's hard to talk about something abstract. What, exactly, did you have in mind?
Re:If only it were so good... (Score:5, Interesting)
Basically, a server could implement smtpx, so that all emails sent using it must be authenticated (no more header spoofing), cannot send X number of emails per Y period (for instance, not more than 10 per minute), and the sending server must have a trust score of at least 50/100 with at least 3 other trusted servers (you can set static trusted servers, like gmail etc which are alwasy checked).
Regular smtp would still be accepted for the time being, but would be put on a 30 minute delay before being delivered (or has some other limitation as incentive to use smtpx - like maybe no attachments?). Sure, you're company might not implement the limitations, but others might, which is why you don't want to deal with smtp - and if you convert smtp to smtpx, you become the sender, so you're trust score would go down if you start forwarding spam (because other servers would see the spam rate go up via spam filters and rate you accordingly). Now of course you need some mechanism so that you can't poison or fake the trust relationships, but I believe problems like that are pretty well solved in modern p2p systems.
Just my 2 cents... now where is someone with that list of things they put X's in that say why such an idea would never work?
Parent
Re:If only it were so good... (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
See earlier posts for the rest of the response.
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This could be built on top of SMTP. The only problem is that either way, you still have to accept mail from people who aren't using it.
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How would this work beyond the server? Say AOL implements this -- how does it prevent me from claiming to send mail from someoneelse@aol.com?
You send the email to mydomain.com, my server then asks aol if they sent that email, they say no, I reject your email. This is similar to how sender-id and SPF already work.
What about people who travel around on a laptop, and thus borrow SMTP servers to send mail "from" their home email address?
So sorry, so sad. That practice has to be let go
Re: (Score:2)
Why? I travel a lot, are you telling me I need a different email address for every location I visit? Imagine if you needed a different email address every time you left the basement! Oh wait, you probably never have, which is why you think what you do.
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I think the only solution is to start from scratch and abandon SMTP completely. If I would know how, I would already be using it and so would the rest of the world.
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I think ive just been hit with a new wave that hasnt yet found its way into RBLs but overall I think solutions such as spamhaus are the way to go.
atleast for now
~Dan
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Can you really read your own post and think you were adding constructively to the topic? Spamming is annoying, ID theft is a crime, but neither deserves more than fines and some jail time."
I guess no one here shares my sense of sadistic humor. Quite honestly, guys like him have ruined the Internet. I remember when the free exchange of ideas on the internet was free of spam and scammers wanting to steal my money. There was a time y
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
~Dan
Re: (Score:2)
I had written tax avoision, and zonk changed it.
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