The short answer: No. Spam will continue to be one of the internet’s most enduring problems. But it’s always nice to see a few small victories here and there. Sanford Wallace, who earned the ignominious title of “Spam King,” is in the news once again.
It seems that Mr. Wallace, in his infinite wisdom, decided to ignore a California federal district court’s order that he turn over requested documents to MySpace, one of the many plaintiffs who have sued him over the years (including AOL, Concentric Network Corp., Compuserve, Bigfoot, and the Federal Trade Commission), and provide a deposition to MySpace’s counsel. According to the complaint, Mr. Wallace ran a phishing scam on MySpace and spammed thousands of its users. Some people will just never learn.
The Spam King claimed that he was unable to comply because he was unaware of the requests and court orders, as he doesn’t accept mail (why might that be?) and also stated that he had a difficult time finding counsel (yes, we lawyers are always reluctant to take on new clients during a recession).
The court didn’t buy it—no surprise there—and entered a default judgment against him. Mr. Wallace is no stranger to default judgments: He had previously been defaulted in May of 2006 in an action brought by the FTC and ordered to pay a fine of $4,089,500. Moral of the story for Mr. Wallace: Don’t break the law. Moral of the story for everyone else: Don’t ignore court orders.
In a separate recent spam case, Edward Davidson, who sent hundreds of thousands of e-mails with false headers, was sentenced to 21 months in prison and ordered to pay $715,000 to the IRS. I suspect, however, that the bulk of the prison sentence was for the tax evasion charges, as it’s only a misdemeanor under the CAN-SPAM act to falsify header information. Yet Mr. Davidson reportedly made at least $3.5 million sending out these e-mails. And who says crime doesn’t pay?
While these cases are always satisfying to read, they are few and far between. Spam is here to stay, regardless of the number of criminal prosecutions brought or default judgments entered. First, the CAN-SPAM act only applies to spammers in the U.S. A growing amount of spam is coming from overseas. Most—if not all—of these foreign spammers are beyond the reach of U.S. law.
Furthermore, many American spammers are reportedly using foreign servers to send their spam into this country. Of course, if they could be identified, then the CAN-SPAM Act could be used against them (but it probably wouldn’t stop them anyway—just ask Sanford Wallace). But you have to identify them first, which is exceedingly difficult when the servers are located outside of the U.S.
So until the stakes for spammers increase substantially and other countries jump on the enforcement bandwagon, sending spam is still quite profitable—fines, penalties, and imprisonment notwithstanding. Death penalty for spam, anyone?
