Gotcha! DNS Popup Scammer Fined $1.9 Million 328
Mister B writes: "A scam artist who trapped surfers mistyping their URLs (including those for children's websites) and barraged them with popup ads for pr0n and gambling has been busted to the tune of about $2 million. Apparently the FTC got ticked after having to close 64 separate browser windows! The FTC has a sense of humour nevertheless: the case name is 'Cupcake Party' (the scammer did business under 'Cupcake') :-) . More details at MSNBC and the FTC."
The best is yet to come? (Score:2, Interesting)
Legal Stuff (Score:2)
INAL
If the case is criminal, absolutely. If you think the fine is excessive (which is unconstitutional), you could appeal it to a higher court. If you don't get the appeal and you don't pay the fine, you definitely could be jailed.
If the case is civil, you can't be jailed for refusing to pay. However, they can send deputies to collect any property you have an auction it off. (remember OJ Simpson) However, some of your property is protected by law, for example, your house, and they can not take that.
As stated before, this case is civil.
Re:The best is yet to come? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The best is yet to come? (Score:2)
Sweet (Score:1)
Re:Sweet (Score:3, Funny)
I was hoping to read it as 2 million lashes. Except these lashes wouldn't be served automatically by a script, but administered by real people who just don't like spam.
He's scamming the scammers (Score:1)
1.8 Million ... (Score:5, Insightful)
People like this will always keep doing shit like this as long as there are enough morons out there to manage to give this dude $1.8 million.
Come on people, wake up.
Re:1.8 Million ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Some anti-spam, anti-scam FBI or FTC division... (Score:3, Informative)
That's precisely the problem, people out there really do call Miss Cleo, buy "make my penis 25% larger" products etc... These schemes are nothing but looting of dumb people.
Just because there is no shortage of dumb people, I don't think we all have to resign ourselves to death by porn spam. Maybe this actually exists, but I'd like to see some online division at the FBI or FTC which aggressively goes after SPAM groups which don't honor remove requests, and scams designed just to take people's money. I'd really like to see Miss Cleo, fake human growth hormone pseudoscience, etc.... all put out of business. I wonder what percent of the American economy is just bs scams.
This may be an impossible problem, given it's global nature, but there is so much **** just in the US, there's plenty that could be done.
Re:1.8 Million ... (Score:3, Insightful)
More like...
the other day, intending to call my friend on the phone, I dialed the wrong number and got 42 phone calls from telemarketing companies trying to sell me phonecards.
Re:1.8 Million ... (Score:2, Insightful)
I flipped the DirecTV to "Mick" instead of "Nick" and suddenly, my tv began showing my kids "Hot Shemales who love Goatsex - Part XVII", removed all my programming restrictions, tried to subscribe me to all the pay-per-views, and every time I tried to change the channel or turn off the TV, it came back.
How is this illegal? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How is this illegal? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How is this illegal? (Score:3, Insightful)
And, what do you think, these 10 year old kids know what JavaScript is? Even what "pop-ups" really are? Give me a break, the majority of the people who get these popups don't know a thing about computers, HTML, JavaScript, popups, or even the Internet in general.
Re:How is this illegal? (Score:3, Insightful)
Lets trace back the process of images being shown to the minor from this site.
Notice that nowhere in this chain of responsibility do we see the website owner. If I own a porn site called http://qwerty.com/ (not actually a porn site), and some child decides to type some characters on the keyboard when unattended, it's only the parents' responsibility.
So, why regulate misspellings and not all short names? It's better to make sure parents understand that the Internet is not "safe" for children (if they see viewing porn as an unsafe activity for children, which I don't).
Re:How is this illegal? (Score:3)
Yeah, and if you are 10 year old walking down the street and find a VHS tape labeled "Scooby Doo Cartoon"
Actually, The trademark owners have a good case against whoever made the tape if it was for commercial gain. The FTC has a good case for fraud if the confusion was deliberate. The parents and DA have a good case since if they can show that the tape's maker was aware that children would likely find the tapes and watch them.
Then, there's the fact that a mechanism in the browser is being knowingly misused to prevent the user from simply clicking back or close to rid themselves of the offending material. For your analogy, the tape would have to be somehow rigged to disable stop, eject and power off on the VCR as well.
Re:How is this illegal? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sometimes i just shut the DVD player off, because thats the only permitted operation. Does _anyone_ make a DVD player that doesn't suffer from this complete bullshit ? It is _ridiculous_ that the DVD spec seems to include the ability to say "you cannot fast forward this".
Maybe Apex or someone lets me retain control of my own property. Anyone know ?
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How is this illegal? (Score:2)
And what, exactly, is wrong with that? (Please tell me you're not one of those people who believe that such domain names should automatically go to the owner of the trademark?)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:How is this illegal? (Score:2)
I agree completely that he was using the name in bad faith, and that's the point that needs to me made against him, not just that he was using the name at all.
Re:How is this illegal? (Score:3, Informative)
Now, please correct me if necessary, but I thought that the only way to infringe on a trademark, even a registered one, was to use that name, or something confusingly similar, to compete against me in the same trade domain. Unless I am in the porn industry, and have registered my trademark in that domain, I don't think my trademark is being infinged.
Similarly, you could create a new line of network switches called 'Matrix', and Toyota (or AOL-TW) couldn't do anything about it. You could create a new clear softdrink and call it 'Windows', and Microsoft couldn't dispute it. You could even register those words as trademarks. No infringement.
Perhaps, being the capitalist person I am, I would consider my best course of action to be to offer Mr. Zuccarini enough money to sell me cicadia.com. My solid belief in capitalist economic principles suggests to me that there must be some amount I could offer which would be more than he would expect to gain by keeping the domain to himself, and he would sell it to me.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:How is this illegal? (Score:2)
I considered that, but I was replying to an AC who began by asking me to assume that "your product is making you lots of $$$" which I figured would be at least enough to offer Mr Zuccarini more than he would make from one measly domain name (considering that he only makes $800K - $1M annually from all his domains combined).
I was further asked to take the position of a 'capitalist person', and purchasing the domain name, at whatever cost necessary, seemed like the ideal capitalist solution. Interference from your wise people in the legislature certainly seems contrary to my (assumed) capitalist ideals :)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:How is this illegal? (Score:2)
Just because some people are not expert in the use of computers does not make them "stupid". <snip>
You're absolutely correct, assuming of course the original poster was speaking frankly. I am of the opinion that his intent was to be humorous; and that your sense of humor needs a little overclocking.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:How is this illegal? (Score:3, Funny)
Beautiful.....a new form of slashdotting.
"Jeez, I've been answering this phone for the last five hours and it's nothing but a buncha pissed off geeks looking for some zuchinni fellow."
Warez (Score:5, Funny)
Just wait until the FTC goes surfing for warez. Maybe they'll shut the bogus warez sites down as well and we'll finally be able to download Microsoft Bob by doing a search on Google.
Re:Warez (Score:2)
Well, duh....
What I fail to see is this..... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is considered criminal behavior. But what about companies like X10 or Casino-On-Net that you see about 30 ads an hour for, every time you try to use the web? In the end it is those companies that make you close more ad windows. I think that those are far more guilty. What about the pr0n ads that won't let you use the back button to leave, and if you try to close the window, they re-open themselves? I shudder to think how many thousands of popups from those companies I've closed in my lifetime.
Of course, it's the browsers themselves that are allowing these popups to happen. I would bet that companies like Doubleclick are paying M$ and Netscape not to develop protection from popups within their browsers. But I'm a conspiracy theorist.
-Evan
Re:What I fail to see is this..... (Score:2, Insightful)
Then use Opera.
So use Mozilla... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:So use Mozilla... (Score:3, Informative)
Now go tell all your family and friends that Mozilla can protect them from having their web experience from being hijacked by malicious users, that they can save their precious bandwidth by blocking annoying ads and that it has beautiful tabs so they can multitask the web. No, they don't have to change browsers, but once they see all the neat things they can do with it, they'll want to change browsers. And then if Microsoft discovers they're losing customers because they don't have these features, only then will they change.
Re:So use Mozilla... (Score:2)
It uses the IE dll's for rendering and it's what IE should have been. It's also free (as in beer).
Re:So use Mozilla... (Score:2)
Go check it out [privoxy.org].
But it already comes with a few regexes for killing popups, so all you'd have to "write" is a one-line change in a CFG.
Re:What I fail to see is this..... (Score:2)
Re:What I fail to see is this..... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:What I fail to see is this..... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What I fail to see is this..... (Score:2)
Other ad companies should pay attention here. Since X10 ads are so prevelant, its only safe to assume that X10 is profiting from them. Its also safe to say that the site owners are getting paid from the impression of them, otherwise you wouldn't see them everywhere. So X10 had a great idea to win on both fronts. For those people who most certainly do not want to see them, X10 can save impression costs. And after disabling the ads, a whole lot of people will quit bitching about those annoying X10 ads. X10 gets to keep advertising to an audience that's a more willing potential customer than those who curse the day X10 was born everytime another ad pops up.
At least this is a better form of market research than gathering random bits of private information about people. And probably far more effective.
-Restil
Re:What I fail to see is this..... (Score:2)
Now the monopoly status of Microsoft begins to get interesting. Seems like there are laws about doing something on a computing device contrary to the intent and desires of the owner of that computing device. The problem with being a monopoly is that "everybody does it" is no defense when you are "everybody".
Re:What I fail to see is this..... (Score:2)
Uhhh... they did.
Re:What I fail to see is this..... (Score:2)
Try:
GET / HTTP/1.0
Accept: text/html, text/plain
For .zip files, try curl or wget, unless you want to cut and paste all of that 8-bit binary from your terminal window.
This guy isn't new.. (Score:5, Informative)
Some random thoughts... (Score:5, Interesting)
Based on what the article is (not) saying, I'm lead to believe that some of these popups cause folks to purchase goods that were never delivered.
If I were the FTC, I would see that this gentleman continue to pay for all the URLs he purchased, and ensure each of them redirects people to the correctly spelled version of the URL he tried to fake, for a period of ten years.
Re:Some random thoughts... (Score:2)
Re:Some random thoughts... (Score:2)
I still feel something is left out of the story.
jeez (Score:5, Funny)
The advertisers are getting screwed (Score:5, Insightful)
In this case the advertisers are getting screwed more than the poor sap who fat-fingered the URL. My question is "Do companies who advertise on the web have any control over how their ads are used?" Cupcake is getting paid by the popup and is really sticking to these advertisers and even moreso because the ads aren't really reaching a target market. I would think the advertisers have more to lose than the person browsing. With that in mind, how hard would it be to script a browser to feed off these popups by creating false hits and start bankrupting advertisers who really don't care how their ads are used.
Re:The advertisers are getting screwed (Score:2)
Some of the scamms (Score:5, Informative)
Here are some of the scammed domains they are talking about
http://www.caroonnetwork.com
http://www.cartoo
http://www.artoonnetwork.com
http://
http://www.cartoonnetork.co
http://www.cartoonnetwrk.com
http://www.catoon
http://www.cartoonnetwok.com
Re:Some of the scams (Score:2)
Here are some more evil scammers sites that are out to get us:
http://www.slahdot.org/ [slahdot.org]
http://www.slasdot.org/ [slasdot.org]
http://www.slshdot.org/ [slshdot.org]
They try to sell you domain registration and mail-shipped OS ISOs.
How ironic (Score:3, Funny)
Rather ironic.
Cor
Happens all the time.... (Score:2, Funny)
A Day In The Life Of Cupcake's Lawyer (Score:5, Funny)
Cupcake's lawyer: "Good news, Cupcake. I just got back from a meeting with the prosecution.
Cupcake: Ok, and what did they say? I'm anxious to know just how bad off I am. Fill me in."
Cupcake's Lawyer: Sure thing. Here's the deal -- The have decided to SEE HOT CHIXXX WITH YOUR NEW X10 CAMERA!!! FREE!!!!!!!!! HOT!!! FREE!!
Cupcake: Yeah, very funny. Now get serious, i'm paying you by the hour. What happened at the meeting?
Cupcake's Lawyer: "HOT!!! HOT NOW!!!! FREE HOT!!! NOW FREE!!!! NOW FREE HOT!!! "
Cupcake: "Stop it!!"
Cupcake's Lawyer: "So, we're not going to have to worry about the fact that the judicial process in these sorts of matters can tend to take HOT XXX HORNY SLUTS!!!!! "
Cupcake: "STOP!!!!"
Cupcake's Lawyer: "HOT!!! HOT HOT FREE HOT NOW!!!! NOW!!! NOW!!!!!!!! FREE NOW!!!! so, you wont be going anywhere for a while. In the meantime, i've asked the presiding judge to look into the prosecutions CASINO ON-NET!!!!!!"
Cupcake: "STOP!! STOP IT!!! JUST STOP IT!!!! NOW!!"
Cupcake's Lawyer: "HOT!!! HOT FREE XXX!!!! XXX NOW!!!! XXX NOW FREE!!!! FREE!!! HOT CASINO!!! HOT CASINO FREE!!!!!!!!!! FREE HOT XXX NEW CASINO!!!! FREE CASINO!!!, so gimmie a call when you decide what to do, and we can go from there. Talk to ya HOT!!!! XXX!!!! FREE HOT!!! then."
Cupcake: But wait a minute! You havent told me......
Cupcake's Lawyer: "HOT!!!!!!!!! HOT XXX CASINO!!! FREE CASINO HOT!!!"
Cupcake: "But!.... But wait!! Dont go yet! You havent..."
Cupcake's Lawyer: "HOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
Not a troll, or a flaimbait, but.. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Victims of the scam should contact the commission"
What victims??!? the stupid users who used stupid browsers that have bad security? (yes pop-ups are a security issue when they start eating your resources). What about the stupid advertising companies? he was in breach of their contract, they should have cancelled it.
Apparently the FTC got ticked after having to close 64 separate browser windows! - judging by the use of the word "task bar" lets assume he was using MS Windows
Well thats what you get when you use MS windows and IE. I would be pretty ticked too, but not at the site, at the appalling software design of Microsoft who hand the responsibility off saying "ohhh trusted system" no it isn't, its simple. Don't let sites spawn 100's of windows with your browser. Put in the necessary function to filter this, let the user say yes or no, let them close all the spawned windows at once, make the browser scan the script for this stuff. stupid developers.
Re:Not a troll, or a flaimbait, but.. (Score:2, Funny)
But how would you feel if Slashdot started directing extra pop-up ads at posters who can't spell "that's" and "their" correctly?
Re:Not a troll, or a flaimbait, but.. (Score:2)
Then there'd be no more Slashdot, as Cdr. Taco and crew would be too lost in pop-up windows to post any new stories!
Re:Not a troll, or a flaimbait, but.. (Score:5, Informative)
As a matter of fact, it IS A CRIME. Laws have been passed with very specifically make it illegal to do register domain names in bad faith and deceive users for commercial gain.
This particular criminal lost other cases and appeals and there was slashdot coverage (well, linking to real news sites, who themselves just rehash the AP wire). If you search, you'll find those articles and the linkage to the appeal court's findings of the specific law that was broken. (If I cared more about slash moderation, I'd go to the trouble to find the old article and links, but you can easily do this yourself)
The point is that there is a law against this specific actitivity. He broken it. It IS as crime. It's about time the FTC finally got around to persuing criminal charges (he's lost dozens of civil cases and knew very well he was breaking the law).
Re:Not a troll, or a flaimbait, but.. (Score:2)
When you know what you're doing is very wrong... (Score:3, Insightful)
It is inexcusable for people to be able to perpetrate such fraud and deception against people and expect to get away with it through denial and clandestine methods.
He KNOWS he was doing something wrong and took extensive measures to hide himself from prosecution. These are not mistakes. These are not errors of judgement. These are not crimes of passion nor momentary lapses of reason. This is an evil bastard who, without remorse wanted to turn a buck at everyone's expense.
People who unintentionally kill someone are more severely punished than this malicious person. It just seems to me that people don't "hate" crime enough to care about really addressing the problem.
And it's also sad that with the millions of complaints by millions of citizens (and consumers) that it takes some annoyed government official to really get the ball rolling to address the problem of scum on the internet.
So the message is that it's okay to piss off anyone except the people who can personally do something about it. The government doesn't represent the people any more... the government just represent themselves for their own purposes.
Excellent. This guy is a scumbag. (Score:5, Interesting)
A couple of days later, I start sniffing around WHOIS records, and whose name do I find attached to the domain? John Zuccarini.
Glad to see this scumbag getting what he deserves.
Re:Excellent. This guy is a scumbag. (Score:2, Informative)
And ironically, I probably just made him a half cent. But maybe I am eligable for returns on a class action suit!!
Re:Excellent. This guy is a scumbag. (Score:2)
The principal wanted to suspend her for a week - the parents (who rushed to the school when they heard about this) managed to talk them down to a day.
The parents allowed the student to get suspended for a day? That's just ludicrous. If it was an honest accident (and there may be more to the story than we see here, like using it to make a big disruption in the class), then there should be zero punishment.
If it was me, I would have said something like, "Tell you what. How about NO punishment, or I sue the school for not having the proper blocking software to prevent my daughter getting exposed to porn." :)
what accident? (Score:2)
hawk
Re:Read the comment again. (Score:2)
When I was in high school it was like a dictatorship you have NO rights what so ever.
I should add that I actually agree with the philosophy of running a tight ship and not allowing the "inmates to run the asylum". I take a very dim view of class disruption (which is why I made the caveat that we didn't know the whole story). However, there is so much "death of common sense" in school districts where they completely turn off their brains when interpreting the rules. Things like suspensions when a six year old makes a pretend gun out of paper and things like that. Stories like that make me want to strangle the school administrators.
Anyway, that's why my kids are going to private school. :)
FBI (Score:2)
mozilla prevents this... (Score:2)
Re:mozilla prevents this... (Score:2)
Read 'websitesthatsuck.com' and it will tell you that popups make a website suck!
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
How can you kneejerk for 9 paragraphs? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:How can you kneejerk for 9 paragraphs? (Score:2)
Re:What a joke... (Score:2)
It is not a question of free speech but a question of boundaries; he crossed my boundaries and violated my space when he typo squatted this domain name in a form that my nieces could easily accidently access.
I guess you don't have kids (nor nieces), so you can't understand.
- Sam
Re: (Score:2)
Re:What a joke... (Score:4, Insightful)
*Ahem*
There are a gazillion exceptions (think child pornography, nazi propaganda, copyright...) I hate to break it to you, but the world isn't black and white. There are exceptions to every rule, even this one.
Besides, pretending like there is some profound ideological difference between a) fining this man for using pop-ups and b) removing the means for this man to use pop-ups is just plain silly.
But this rant is pointless, since the obvious point of course is this: this has nothing to do with free speech. It has to do with the medium he uses to convey his "message." He is entitled to say "FREE XXX PORN!! HORNY XXX SLUTS!!" all he wants, he just can't do it this way. Very much like someone can't be allowed to go to a schoolyard where 7-year olds are playing and start screaming "HORNY TEENAGE SLUTS."
Were this not moderated to 5 it would not be worthy of a reply. Actually, it isn't now either. I should have modded you to hell instead of writing this tedious rant.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:What a joke... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:What a joke... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
scary precedent (Score:3, Interesting)
I just find the precedent that someone gets fined $1.8M for having domains that are kind of similar to the domains that some big companies have scary. A figure that large seems to come out of thin air. I mean, who got harmed? The advertisers got their money's worth, and no kid is going to confuse the product of "cartoonnetwork.com" with a bunch of big breasted women.
Particularly chilling is that WIPO considered registration of "guinesssucks.com" [wipo.int] a trademark violation in his case (trademarks are only intended to identify a specific product; they are not intended to let trademark owners control what people say about the product).
I think this is a dangerous threat to free speech. Sure, this particular guy isn't particularly nice. But what if you or I want to create a web site "sony-service-sucks.com", where we exchange grievances about Sony service and perhaps organize a class action lawsuit? What if your domain name happens to be confusingly similar to someone's trademark and they don't consider your business legitimate and have the legal dollars to "prove" it?
Trademark holders are trying to expand their right from being able to merely control that a trademark refers without confusion to their product to a right of complete control of who uses the trademark under what circumstances in any domain, and to prohibit any kind of negative speech about their product. And they are succeeding. That should worry us all.
Re:scary precedent (Score:2)
I dunno--I find your position a bit more elitist than mine. I mean, it doesn't take a CS degree to select an option in a dialog box or to use a different browser. If popup ads annoy John Q. Public too much, then John Q. Public can figure out how to turn them off easily (maybe by asking friends). And both the popup ads themselves and the mechanisms for turning them off are entirely under the control of software vendors, so John Q. Public can vote with his dollars by not buying software that annoys him too much. Isn't that the minimum we should be able to expect from every adult?
Ethics (Warning, vaguely off topic) (Score:2)
Someone who obviously missed the CS ethics class.
It does pose a very interesting question. If you could become quite wealthy due to sleezy and underhanded action(s) which would ultimately damage your reputation and that of the Internet, would you? Perhaps this would make a good poll question.
Re:glad (Score:1)
Re:glad (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot knows a lot of their users block pop-ups so they put their ads on the pages they serve, plus they serve them from images.slashdot.org so that people can't block it on their hosts file.
As long as only a small percentage of people block pop-ups and use hosts files I can surf the internet without seeing X-10 ads ever, so you should tell people that they shouldn't block pop-ups and that it hampers their web surfing experience.
Actually it is already happening. (Score:2, Informative)
After I re-enabled popup in opera Is aw what was happening : they loaded in the main window the ad, then make a popup resuming the old content of the mainwindow in a freaking pop up.
Clever. If it becomes mainstream you can forget anti popup software and opera special feature.
Re:glad (Score:2)
Privoxy (formerly JunkBuster Internet Proxy) [privoxy.org] does a great job of blocking the slashdot ads, and ads from most other sites on the internet. Even if you have a fast internet connection, time invested to install it is greatly paid back in not waiting and being annoyed by ads!
Privoxy is once again under active development... which is a true success story of the GPL, where a group of interested individuals picked it up after JunkBuster's decided to abandon further development (partly over concern for liability in creating derivitive works of web pages by suppressing the ads)
Re:glad (Score:2)
Well that, and the ability to log into "dot net" sites like Hotmail so you can do your daily chore of shoveling the day's accumulation of ~100 pornographic spams into the trash. (If you don't, Microsoft will clear room for the spam by deleting the juicy old letters from ex-girlfriends you have in there.)
Re:glad (Score:2)
Back in 98 I did, before the Borg took it over and promptly messed it up with their spammer-friendly systems that leak valid usernames to anyone with nothing of value to sell.
That's business with dot NET.
Re:I hope they make Gates pay half of it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I hope they make Gates pay half of it. (Score:2)
Re:Yet another reason ... (Score:2)
Re:Better Idea: We Beat the Crap Out of Them (Score:2)
The guy who set up the list on his web page went down for manslaughter and accomplice to murder.
Its not a matter of being shut down, anyone associated with this list would be prosecuted.
Re:Whats next? (Score:2)
Well we all know whose fault it really is. Suppose General Motors had a monopoly on auto manufacturing and refused to manufacture cars with lockable doors or ignitions, because they listened to some morons in focus groups complaining about having to remember their car keys. Car theft would become a major problem. Naturally General Motors would be at fault, but it would be dishonest to say that the car thieves themselves shouldn't rightly share at least a part of the blame.
Except in this case "General Motors" has proven itself immune to prosecution. (Just look at that email client they sell that brings the Internet to its knees on a regular basis by executing whatever garbage arrives in its inbox and granting it permission to your address book.) Until the car thieves start buying their own legislation, there's no reason to just let them off the hook.