Yesterday, a Los Angels court awarded MySpace $230 million dollars in its law suit against the so-called Spam King, Sanford Wallace and his partner Walter Rines. The suit involves the duo’s luring login ifnromation from MySpace users through various phishing sites, and then using their friends lists to to send gambling, pornography and ringtone span. They sent a total of 735,925 messages and racked in $500,000 dollars in the process.
The judge fined the partners the maximum amount under the CAN-SPAM law — $100 per message plus other various fines. ((Spring, Tom. “MySpace Wins Record $230m in Case Against ‘Spam King’.” PCWorld 14 May 2008 14 May 2008 <http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/006956.html>.))
I wonder what MySpace is going to do with the money. The shame is that it takes a MySpace to bring the boom down — but thanks for swinging it.
Do your students know what spam is? ..how it works? ..how people make money from it? ..and what it costs us?
Good job MySpace! People like them deserve to be punished even more severely than that.
Interesting timing… I sent the following to our school administrators and classroom resource teachers this past week regarding SPAM as I get notes from staff who are concerned about the handful of messages they get in their mailboxes. As a point of reference, we have just over 500 users on our district mail system.
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I have noted a bit of an increase in the amount of SPAM finding its way into my mailbox. You and your staff may have as well. You might find the following statistic interesting.
For the period March 31, midnight, to April 30, midnight, there were 114,436 email messages sent from outside our system to sd46 addresses. Yes, outside, this does not include messages sent within the district, only those that were processed by the spam filter. That is a lot of messages. Only 34,413 were delivered to our users. The rest were marked as containing viruses (only 12) or containing malicious attacks at our mail program itself (311). That means that 79,700 were coded as containing SPAM and were blocked from our users ever seeing them. Of the 30.07% of the mail that did get through, marked as good, to be delivered to our users, some of that we know was SPAM too… just not a lot of it.
Just think of the hew and cry had the other almost 80,000 messages hit our staff mailboxes.
For the classroom teachers reading this message, it may be an interesting topic to raise with your students.
Cheers… Bob
Ipsum
I can’t say i know much about how SPAM works and how people make money from it. All I know is that it is incredibly annoying to spend my morning deleting messages touting obnoxious claims. Rather sad. I’m glad someone is helping to take them down.
Sometimes having a full staff of corporate lawyers does provide a societal benefit. By the way, I think you meant “rack up” or “rake in” the cash… 😉