Court orders spammers to pay US$236M to Iowa ISP
 

$10 USD per email... :Oh crap

A federal judge has ordered an Arizona couple to pay more than US$236 million for sending millions of spam messages to a small Iowa ISP (Internet service provider).

Henry Perez and his wife Suzanne Bartok were ordered to pay the damages ? amounting to US$10 per bulk email ? following a four-year court case in which the judge found that they had bombarded CIS Internet Services of Clinton, Iowa, over a four-month period in 2003.

According to a ruling by Judge John Jarvey of Iowa federal court, Perez and Bartok used a program called Bulk Mailing 4 Dummies to send millions of emails to CIS servers, forcing the company to undergo an expensive server upgrade and to dedicate three servers to blocking spam.

Starting in 2001, CIS gradually became overwhelmed by unsolicited email that came from a variety of sources, according to company owner Robert Kramer III. By 2003, the company was processing about 500 million spam messages every day.

Kramer thinks that he may have been hit with extra spam because his company's cis.net domain was confusingly similar to the cis.com domain once used by CompuServe, at one time one of the largest ISPs in the US.

The attacks cut into CIS's bandwidth, making it harder for customers to surf the web and ultimately costing Kramer a lot of business. His company's client base dropped from about 5,000 customers in 2001 to just 1,200 by late 2004.

"There were millions of emails being delivered to us for each spam campaign to users that didn't exist on our servers," Kramer said in an interview. "It was do or die: it wasn't just a nuisance for us."

Perez and Bartok had argued that they were not spammers and that the email messages they used were legitimately generated, but the judge didn't buy it, writing in his Sept. 30 order that their explanation was simply "not credible."

"The court simply does not believe Mr. Perez or Ms. Bartok," Jarvey wrote.

Since the dark days of 2003, CIS has filed suit against many spammers and so far it has received about 10 judgments in its favour, Kramer said. Collecting the money has proven to be difficult, however. Many of the spammers have gone out of business, moved their money overseas or simply hidden from sight, he said.

In fact, Kramer was awarded a judgment against Perez and Bartok's company, AMP Dollar Savings, in late 2004, but he has so far been unable to collect.

Spam volumes have dropped significantly over the past five years, Kramer said. Now CIS receives between 10 million and 15 million unwanted messages each day, a more manageable amount.

Kramer said that this drop may be due, in part, to his litigation. "Certainly some of the people we went after would have continued doing it if they hadn't been held accountable."

Source

Until emails are paid for we will have spam. Once there is a fee for sending them then spam will drop or even disappear. Let's say you get 1000 free emails per connection every month and 1000 per gig of server space you own. Then people will have to pay for the extra emails for instance $1 per 100. It will mean everyone can use emails for personal and business but spammers will get hit.

There will still be free emails services, but you can opt to receive them or block them.

OK the numbers and principle might need adjusting but this is the only way to stop spam.

Good. I hate spam.

I set up a clean gmail account about 3 months ago, haven't used it for anything, and now it's totally unuseable already.

Fuck the spammers.

Since after winning the suit they cant collect the fines it would be better to give stiff Jail time to these bottom feeding scum spammers. :2 cents::2 cents:

winning is one thing... collecting is another..

Which makes the legal system a joke. These people must of made money and probably have assets like a house, put them on the streets is my answer. :mad:

Agreed....:2 cents::thumbsup

Using public mail as yahoo,hotmail or gmail is bad idea beacuse spam bots generate list of milllions possible name variations so even if you never used it will still be hitted by spam.

How stupid. The judges in these cases probably have zero to little understanding. Wow, it forced an ISP to have anti spam measures, something they should already have???

that judge is a moron...how the hell did they win the bench

You don't know much about internet and protocols or you wouldn't suggest something like this. :)

Trying DoSing someone for a few months and see what happens. They're supposed to have anti-DoS measures, right?

that's crazy

A system like hashcash would be an option but charging real money to send an email is BS... a technical nightmare that would cost a lot more to implement and keep safe than dealing with spam the way we do now.

Charging for email would never work, people would never accept it

Iowa ftw!

Its pretty easy to set it up so non existant users don't accept mail.

Emails are not free...............

:2 cents:

"The attacks cut into CIS's bandwidth, making it harder for customers to surf the web and ultimately costing Kramer a lot of business. His company's client base dropped from about 5,000 customers in 2001 to just 1,200 by late 2004."

no people got broadband...wow what an asshat

exactly .

I agree charging for mail will never work. There will always be a free mail service. Although sending regular mail is what 38c or something now. An email for 1c would still be a bargain.

Right, but consider the volume. 500 million attempts per day is 5787 new connections per second, which is certainly excessive for a customer base that size. Handling that level of connections would not be easy for a single server. In addition, if each SMTP transaction uses about 1k of transfer back and forth then you're looking at 5.8Mbytes/sec or an additional 46Mbit/sec worth of bandwidth just to respond to this garbage. In 2003 this level of bandwidth wouldn't have come cheap, particularly considering that the spamming was providing zero value add to the company and its customers.

Back of the envelope calcs...

5000 customers, let's assume they're all dialup
10:1 modem ratio, which means 500 modems @56kbps theoretical max transfer
500 x 56kbps = a mere 28Mbit/sec of MAXIMUM bandwidth used... but the above figure for accepting spams would be AVERAGE...

Now do you see how drastically it could have affected their business? Imagine having to pay 3 times as much for your bw just because one third party asshole decides he's going to mail your customers.

"Perez and Bartok used a program called Bulk Mailing 4 Dummies to send millions of emails to CIS servers"

hmmm :Oh crap

he deserves it. I hate spam!

500 million a day is some serious fucking volume...

They said the same thing about TV and Radio. Now we have people paying for both. Never say never.