Spam King arrested in Seattle

A 27-year-old man, dubbed the Spam King by investigators, has been arrested in Seattle where he has been indicted on charges of mail fraud, wire fraud, fraud in connection with electronic mail, and money laundering. Robert Alan Soloway owned Newport Internet Marketing Corporation (NIM) based in Seattle. He will appear before …

[Andrew Kirch]

bye bye, Bobby

We'll miss you, don't bother to write us.

[Anonymous Coward]

What punishment would fit the crime?

The only fit sentence, assuming he is found guilty, is life imprisonment with the option of renewal when it's over (renewal of the imprisonment, that is, not his life, which he has demonstrated to be completely worthless.

Thieves and vagabonds sometimes deserve mercy, but never ever spammers.

[Morely Dotes]

Discovery meay lead to ID theft charges as well

Soloway has a long history of various kinds of theft and fraud; anyone stupid enough to make a purchase from a spammer (such as Soloway) would be at risk of ID theft as well, and there's every chance he took advantage of the data provided by his idiot customers.

[Andy]

Rejoice!

How I shall miss the thousands of bounced spams in which he so kindly put my email address as the sender.

Bobby deserves to be budgeoned around the head with a large tin of Hormel's finest pork product until he is very sorry indeed. And then a bit more.

[Stephen Beynon]

SPF

Andy: since I enabled spf on my domains I have had a vastly reduced number of bounces from messages that were faked from my domains. While spf is by no means perfect it has helped me.

Stephen

[Anonymous Coward]

Death penalty

It's time we introduced the death penalty for spammers - I can't think of another activity that has an impact on so many people

[Josh Hamilton]

Why don't we treat Spammers like the criminals that they are?

Someone please explain to me why this guy can cost businesses and individuals thousands, if not millions of dollars in hardware, software and lost time/productivity and only get fined. If he had walked into a home or business and pulled cash out of a drawer, he would be doing hard time. Why does white collar crime (of a much larger magnitude) not condone public hanging? Maybe it's not appropriate here, as I do not know all the details of the case, but I would like to see spammers, virus writers and hackers dragged out into the street and shot. I think this would solve a lot of the IT issues that they cause very quickly.

[Kevin]

Actually

I say make him eat Hormel's finest pork in a tin for each meal in jail that would be fitting punishment.

[John Stag]

How much...

He causes billions of $$$ of cleanup costs, wastes millions of hours of people's time, and he only gets this little slap on the wrists?

Meanwhile, there's people in there for life, no parole, for minor drug offences.

This isn't some underprivileged ghetto child we're talking about here. He's a person who had plenty of choices but chose to be a spamming, fraudster. He has no excuse for what he did, he's the one who deserves life in prison.

[Anonymous Coward]

Punishment

He could chip the rust off a retired battleship... when the job's done he can go free.

[Anonymous Coward]

Anecdotal evidence, but...

I don't know when this guy was picked up, but i've noticed about a 25% drop in the amount of spam I receive over the last week - I check several accounts and typically have around 290 spam mails per day - this has dropped to around 220-230 for me.

[William Eaton]

A Good Start

Let's give him a light sentence of 20 years or so. Just enough to be a deterrent...no need to be punitive.

[John Stag]

Less spam already?

"I don't know when this guy was picked up, but i've noticed about a 25% drop in the amount of spam I receive over the last week"

Hmmmm....I doubt he sends it personally, one by one. I'm sure his botnet is still alive and well and will be for some weeks/months to come.

[Pascal Monett]

Hang him !

No need to waste more time with him then with his spam. I delete the results of his activities in a few seconds, I suggest we should delete him with the same speed.

[Acidbass]

Advertising

What strikes me is the similarity between mass spamming, which is apparently not supported by governments and councils, and public advertising, which is not only endorsed by but generates large amounts of revenue for our political currently-non-lizard-only-in-appearance overlords.

Every time we walk around our town centres we see dozens of thirty foot long advertisements on the sides of streets and buildings. Business 'parks' and retail [discharge] outlets encloak themselves in this revenue-generating sh1t and, not content with covering our countryside with motorways, some cnut comes along and parks an advert-smeared artic alongside them too lest those driving might at least enjoy looking at the countryside their motorway has ruined (the motorways should be underground, costly at first just like the original motorway but cheap enough once the DfT has paid for a couple of TBMs and learned the techniques).

Adverts are garish, have weak jokes and puns (but seriously, the lowest common denominator can't be THAT low?) and seem to me to obscure some of the nicest things - classic architecture, trees and plants and stuff; i'd rather see a pile of rubble than three adverts for three different banks' identical rip-off cabal-price-matched five-points-below savings account, or BT rubbing my face in the fact that they supply millions of people with a service that would make shannon weep.

They're on buses, they're on street furniture, they're even free-standing in little metal cases in the middle of the pavement. The councils local to me have for some years been allowing businesses to put permanent metal adverts on roundabouts and sponsoring road signs. They're using screens now too, with speakers. $DEITY preserve me! I have successfully avoided television for years and now I'm forced to endure them in public?

The ones outside my work you actually have to walk around, and they're totally legit: more o'ferrall and their competitors are raking in huge amounts of cash for something which is, my ranting aside, little more than an annoyance, just like mr spam king. Compared to them, mr spam king is smalltime.

Spam: hated by end-users and infrastructure providers, not even really liked by legitimate businesses despite being a very effective in-your-face marketing technique (presumably because of the resulting opprobrium).

Billboards: i don't know anyone else who seems to object to them, yet I know nobody who actually likes them. They're a part of life, but imagine how much nicer it would be without them. They make our cities look cheap, cost the businesses involved huge amounts in marketing budgets, which increases the cost of the product, and for what? so that the big names in a given sector stay the big names, while treading water relative to each other. The smart consumer pays them no heed anyway, seeking out the genuinely congruent product on teh interweb.

As a smoker I'm not too bothered that my ability to smoke in public places is about to be curtailed, as it is unpleasant for non-smokers and is generally a bad thing to be discouraged, so when do we get *this* public nuisance removed?

I bet some of you can see adverts right now, out of your window or perhaps even inside your workplace (hmmm, adblock for my own eyes...? now there's a technoology i'll never get funding to develop).

Let's all take a few moments to imagine how pretty our towns and cities would look with no advertising at all. Go on, do it now. It's wonderful innit? NOT going to happen. Bad luck.

Soz for hijacking the comments with my rant, although it's blatantly what you all read the comments for : - ) I'm not a mailbombing fringe-lunatic really, just a normal guy who feels that turning corporations into collectives would solve a lot of the world's problems. Woo and yay for hippies and beards.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bring back the chain gang

Prison costs the taxpayer a fortune so that's not a solution I'm happy with. This white collar thug has cost people way more money than he actually ever pocketed himself so even fines would fall short. He needs to be put to work cleaning graffiti off walls or some other useful activity.

[Mark Rendle]

Good

As somebody who has had his e-mail address blacklisted by various spam filters thanks to this idiot (and others like him), I don't think I'm over-reacting when I say: I hope they hang the bastard.

[Alan Davies]

Does anyone

have his email address?

[Albert]

The real cost of SPAM is now what he earned

The real cost of SPAM is now what he earned but the cost to corporations to minimise it's impact on their business which I would expect to my in the millions.

[Del Merritt]

Spam Bob Sends Rants

I can say that the arrest of Spam Bob Send Rants hasn't slowed the spam in my inbox in an appreciable way. There seemed to be a brief lull yesterday, but today it's back to full feed.

As to billboards: several states in the US have banned billboards in one way or another. I live in one, and I happen to like it.