Man Threatened Spam Attack In $200,000 Extortion Plot 77
52-year-old Anthony Digati was arrested for trying to extort $200,000 from an insurance firm by threatening to spam them with six million emails unless they paid up. Digati said he would use a spam service and his amazing talents as a "huge social networker" to drag the company "through the muddiest waters imaginable" and presumably unfriend everyone. He added that the price would increase to $3 million if they failed to pay up by Monday, according to federal authorities.
Mafia? (Score:5, Funny)
"That's an awfully nice looking email server you've got there. It'd be a shame if something happened to it."
Hire him. (Score:5, Funny)
If I were the company, I would have hired him for PR and marketing department.
How the worm has turned!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Mafia? (Score:2, Funny)
*knocks over a display rack*
"Oops."
Re:6 million spam messages? (Score:4, Funny)
Tuesday. In the morning. From 8:15 AM to 8:25 AM. On a slow day.
Seems kinda more "Doctor Evil" than actual evil, doesn't it?
"I demand.." [brings pinkie to lip] ".. one MILLION dollars."
[collective governments of the world laugh with relief]
Re:Target selection FAIL (Score:5, Funny)
Reminds me of those Somali pirates that decided it would be a good idea to try to hijack a French corvette. Once they started shooting the French said "Welp, okay" and blew them out of the water.
OMG! (Score:5, Funny)
Cue Dr. Evil Pinky... (Score:5, Funny)
Dr. Evil: If you don't pay up we're going to send out... ...6 MILLION emails.
[pinky to corner of mouth]
Number Two: Don't you think we send out *more* than six million emails? Six million emails isn't exactly a lot of spam these days. Virtucon alone gets over 9 billion spam messages per day!
[REFORMATED] Re:Sorry Anthony.... (Score:2, Funny)
[GAHHHHH SLASHDOT FORMATTING.]
Sorry Anthony, but your scheme where a company pays you to not spam them advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based (X) vigilante
approach to preventing 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
(X) 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
(X) The police will not put up with it
(X) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential
employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) 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
(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) 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
(X) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(X) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X) 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:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
(X) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Re:we need a fancy new name for the digital mafia (Score:3, Funny)