Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Will law suits stop Spam Kings?

Spam is a vehicle for a lot of deceptive (false) advertising and financial crimes when phishing schemes are deployed using them.

Here is an announcement that MySpace is going after a Sanford Wallace (described as a spam king) with a civil action.

From the Business wire release:
MySpace announced today that it filed suit against Sanford Wallace for violations of state and federal laws including the CAN-SPAM Act and California's anti-spam and anti-phishing statutes. The suit, filed in United States District Court in Los Angeles on Friday, seeks a permanent injunction barring Wallace and his affiliated companies from the MySpace site in addition to unspecified monetary damages.

Full release, with other MySpace actions (commendable), here.

With each release of their statistics, the Anti Phishing Working Group seems to report that phishing and spam are breaking new records.

It would be nice to see governments (which manage law enforcement resources) take some of these cases for investigation and (if warranted) file criminal charges, also.

I'm not sure if forcing spam kings to pay fines is a very effective deterrent. They are liable to view it as a "cost of doing business." Perhaps if a few of them lost their freedom, the statistics (growing all the time) might start to go down.

Statistics are numbers, but they relate to real people being victimized by this activity.

No comments: