King Of Spam Busted

[Aaryanna]

[COLOR="DarkGreen"][FONT="Book Antiqua"]I'm sure I'm not the only one to find this amusing: [URL="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26797741/"][U]Spammer Busted[/U][/URL] Apparently you [I]can[/I] go to jail for e-mail spamming. [I]*laughs*[/I] Guess all those cars and bank accounts won't be doing him any good where he's going to.

I'm actually kind of glad to see him get busted, since e-mail spam, even though it goes to your spam folder, is annoying since it often goes to your inbox first. You have to identify it as spam in order for it to be added to the list of known junk e-mail addresses.

So yeah. It's just to bad that they haven't busted more of these idiots out there. So, anyone else smirking over this as much as I am? Also, do you get bugged by spam a lot? Sometimes I do and other times I don't get much at all. [/FONT][/COLOR]

[Dragon Warrior]

[size=1]You know, you cannot blame the guy. That sounds like easy money, haha. I mean, if you check it out, he was making over twenty thousand a day, and for that much money, that's a pretty simple job. It's no wonder most criminals resort to crime. Either way, yeah, I get spam, but it's not so bad for me. Yahoo Mail does a pretty good job of sending the unwanted stuff to my Spam folder, and I only have to occassionally delete a few unwanted e-mails along with some MySpace and Facebook notifications. No big deal.

It's probably best they are cracking down on these spammers. At least the guy was honest about everything and fessed up right away. He was even willing to speak freely about how it was all greed. It makes him a little better than your average criminal.

A little. Not much.[/size]

[Jeremy]

[SIZE="2"][SIZE="1"]I agree with Dragon Warrior on this. Greed does often get the best of some people, and this guy was making so much money every single day, and that's a temptation that's hard to resist I'm sure. But yea it is good that they're cracking down. I never did like spam : p[/SIZE][/SIZE]

[Clash]

[COLOR="DarkRed"]I never get spam. I like spam, spam is yummy!!!:animesmil Anyways, I see you're not talking about food.....................i'm kinda glad he got busted, he fooled alot of people. and some people are foolish enough to listen to him. spam filters are what i have and they are almost all the time EMPTY.[/COLOR]

[Dragon Warrior]

[size=1]It's not so much the people were foolish when they believed it. I remember when I first got into e-mail and stuff, I trusted ads and spam because I didn't know better. Almost everyone when they first start off on computers are ignorant of the dangers of spam, viruses, and etc. So until someone is computer savvy, they're simply vulnerable to their own ignorance. It's not their fault, it just can't be avoided.[/size]

[Clash]

[quote name='Dragon Warrior'][size=1]It's not so much the people were foolish when they believed it. I remember when I first got into e-mail and stuff, I trusted ads and spam because I didn't know better. Almost everyone when they first start off on computers are ignorant of the dangers of spam, viruses, and etc. So until someone is computer savvy, they're simply vulnerable to their own ignorance. It's not their fault, it just can't be avoided.[/size][/QUOTE]

[COLOR="DarkRed"]Well obviously when someone just gets into the computer game, there's usually something that shows why spam and stuff is not good. They either didn't read it or read it and didn't heed it. I've been in the email game and the first time I got on, I was aware of ads and spam my parents warned me about them and put in spam filters.:cross: Probably, most of these people were computer savvy, but the "too good to be true" thing got over their common sense.[/COLOR]

[Dragon Warrior]

[size=1]I'm just saying not everyone has someone to tell them firsthand. Some people, particularly older generations, want to get with the "in crowd" so they go get a PC or Mac. But no one is around to warn them of certain dangers, so they find spam and are like, "I won one hundred dollars! Oh boy!" I know when my mom got her computer, she still clicked those ads on wesbites, even with my dad and myself being in the house.

Sorry if that paragraph sounded primitive. I just went for a run and pretty much all oxygen has left my brain for the time being :P Haha.[/size]

[Gavin]

[SIZE="1"]Even though this probably won't have any real effect on the amount of spam floating about out here on the internet, it's good to know that these dumbasses will face punishment if they're caught. I got a torrent of spam email over the summer this year, about two months solid of three to four emails every day and the solution of "just delete them" as espoused by the King of Spam seriously became tiresome after a while.

These guys should seriously be banned from going near anything more advanced than an egg-timer for the rest of their lives.[/SIZE]

[Rachmaninoff]

Can't say I feel sorry that he got busted. Even if you can just delete them, it doesn't change the fact that they're annoying. Plus depending on the person/organization, the amount of spam they get can be rather staggering. Anything I do connected with school tends to land more spam where personal accounts tend to get far less.

I never click on them, other than to report them as spam if it happens to land in my inbox. Still we don't need that kind of stuff. Though the way that guy was making so much money explains a lot. Obviously if there wasn't any profit to be had, people wouldn't bother to do it.

[James]

[font=franklin gothic medium]I read somewhere that the amount of spam is now so high that it is responsible for some significant percentage of internet slowdown globally. Ugh.

I think my bigger pet peeve is viruses. I mean...who actually sits down and deliberately makes these things?

I can't imagine setting out to create something that will disrupt businesses and damage people's computers. It's just totally malicious and the creator really gets nothing financial out of it - they just get some kind of weird satisfaction perhaps.

Always good to hear about spammers/virus creators being caught.[/font] :catgirl:

[TheShinje]

I just find spam funny. I get a lot of requests from alleged American banks asking me to provide my login information for this reason or that. They don't seem to get the fact that I'm way over here in New Zealand and I'm wasting their time by providing fake login and password info. :animesmil

Nigerian banking scams are always good for a laugh. Being asked to launder an amount of money twice the GDP of many small countries, well, you wonder just how gullible people are, to believe that some bajillionaire wants to put money into your bank account.

Good to see some of these ratbags get their comeuppance, even if they do provide the smarter of us with our daily comic relief needs.

[Retribution]

[quote name='Sabre']Nigerian banking scams are always good for a laugh. Being asked to launder an amount of money twice the GDP of many small countries, well, you wonder just how gullible people are, to believe that some bajillionaire wants to put money into your bank account.[/QUOTE]
[font=Arial]Yeah, I'm of a similar opinion. Ever tried luring them?

419eater.com

Many lulz to be shared![/font]

[SunfallE]

[COLOR="RoyalBlue"][FONT="Lucida Sans Unicode"][quote name='James'][font=franklin gothic medium]I read somewhere that the amount of spam is now so high that it is responsible for some significant percentage of internet slowdown globally. Ugh.[/font] [/QUOTE]Considering how many junk e-mails land in my junk folder... I'm not surprised. I usually clear it out, otherwise, by the end of the week, that folder is just stuffed and then some. XP

I use to think they were funny, now, I'd rather not see them at all. I hope busting people who do this kind of thing becomes a regular occurrence. Now [I]that[/I] would truly be entertaining. [/FONT][/COLOR]

[Red]

[quote name='James'][font=franklin gothic medium]I read somewhere that the amount of spam is now so high that it is responsible for some significant percentage of internet slowdown globally. Ugh.

I think my bigger pet peeve is viruses. I mean...who actually sits down and deliberately makes these things?

I can't imagine setting out to create something that will disrupt businesses and damage people's computers. It's just totally malicious and the creator really gets nothing financial out of it - they just get some kind of weird satisfaction perhaps.

Always good to hear about spammers/virus creators being caught.[/font] :catgirl:[/QUOTE]

I would imagine it makes things chug a bit. According to wiki 110 billion spam e-mails are sent a day, which equates to a whopping 102 terabytes of daily bandwidth usage if all the mails are only 1Kb in size. That's an awful lot of data but I wouldn't be surprised if the real figure is even higher!

These days, most of the more damaging viruses are created with financial gain in mind. A good chunk of the spam being sent out is handled by botnets, huge networks of compromised machines that are controlled by a single person or group without the end user knowing. These things can and do change hands for thousands of dollars at a time, if not more - it's even possible to rent some!

Having control of one of those things would potentially allow you to send millions of spam e-mails a day without using your own bandwidth. If only 0.1% of your targets reply to you, the [size=1]PRINCE OF NIGERIA'S BEST MATE WHO NEEDS £1000 TO SAVE ORPHANED PUPPIES[/size], you still have 1000 potential sources of cash. That's a big return for a relatively small investment, if you can call it that :p

Also, I've just read that the name of the US anti-spam act is CAN-SPAM. :D

[Carbon Series]

When i first read this thread I thought wow, thats a little harsh, being jailed for spam emails. Yes i know they're annoying but so are many other people, Peter André, Chiko, there are many more who are just as annoying but arent in prison. But to see those statistics, I mean thats a stupid amount of bandwidth for these spam emails, imagine a world where the internet did what it was supposed to do, all the time, reliably. With that in mind maybe jail's just what the doctor ordered.

[Vicky]

[quote name='Carbon Series']When i first read this thread I thought wow, thats a little harsh, being jailed for spam emails. Yes i know they're annoying but so are many other people, Peter André, Chiko, there are many more who are just as annoying but arent in prison. But to see those statistics, I mean thats a stupid amount of bandwidth for these spam emails, imagine a world where the internet did what it was supposed to do, all the time, reliably. With that in mind maybe jail's just what the doctor ordered.[/QUOTE]

[size=1]Peter and Chico (you mean the "it's Chico time!" dude right?) aren't false advertising on a massive scale, nor scamming on a massive scale hehe =p (and the mass media makes money off 'em - why would they get rid of their favourite stars?!) so they can't really go to jail. Spam, the majority of it, is pretty much forgery, theft and just plain cheeky.

I hate all kinds of spam - I'll personally ***** slap my friends if they send me any chain letters. Seriously, the amount of e-mail accounts I've had JUST to get rid of spam is immense... I don't even know where they get my e-mail. Also, I'm always incredibly insulted by spam mail: NO I am NOT a man, therefore not interested in my penis size! I get mistaken for a man in real life, I don't need it online ¬_¬ (though it happen here once... you know, with all the male Vicky's running around nowadays).

I also get stupid text messages on my phone and e-mails to that account, like "Paris Hilton Sex Video!". What? That's disgusting. It's absolutely vile! And when it's not advertising straight porn it's for gay men... they're going in the right direction, [i]at least[/i]. I honestly don't understand why it's me amongst everyone else that gets bombarded with all the sex and porn... I don't go on those sites, and certainly if I did would never use my e-mail, and... I don't even like it =/. The whole jargon is banned from my computer!

They shouldn't have sent him to jail, though. They should have e-mailed his picture in a massive frenzy to whoever they could find and let the world handle him.

I do understand the kicks people get from viruses though. You have no idea of the pure entertainment I myself get from stealing my friend's passwords or messing around with their system. Hypocritical? Of course![/size]

[Nathan]

[FONT="Arial"][quote name='Vicky][size=1']They shouldn't have sent him to jail, though. They should have e-mailed his picture in a massive frenzy to whoever they could find and let the world handle him.[/size][/quote]Now [I]that[/I] would have been amusing, not very pretty, but amusing just the same.

The only thing I find a touch sad in regards to them actually catching and dealing with that guy, is it won't make much of a dent in the real problem. There are too many junk and spam e-mails being sent nowadays.

I remember when I first started getting them, all the pathetic scams and crap that got sent was fun for a laugh. Now, they're just annoying. [/FONT]