January 4, 2010 – 2:47 pm
Alleged spammer Lance Atkinson (left) and his lawyer Darrell Kake (right) leave the Federal Court in Brisbane after the trial. Photo: Scott Casey
Almost every country in the world has drafted legislation that penalises spammers. We feel that these laws are not strong enough as they focus on the spammers and not the actual advertisers…these are almost always different people.
Spammers make their money by selling all sorts of pills and cheap consumer products through spam emails that they send out in massive quantities. A medium sized spam operation can send out around 10 billion messages a day. The spammer does not actually sell the products, they just drive traffic to advertisers who process the sale and then pay a commission to the spammer. Current spam legislation focuses on penalizing the spammer…but before you can do this you need to locate them. This is a very lengthy and expensive exercise…we feel that it is easier to target the advertisers.
After nearly a ten year case US and Australian courts have put an end to the illegal activities of Lance Thomas Atkinson and Jody Smith. The couple ran a huge spam delivery system that spanned several countries and sent out billions of emails a day.
This case was first taken up by BBC reporter Simon Cox in 2000. He got angry when he received an advertisement for some herbal remedy tablets in a spam email. By using a variety of tricks he was able to follow the spammer from Florida, China, India and ultimately to New Zealand. He passed on the details to SpamHaus and they took up the chase.
Spamhaus, which tracks the world’s biggest spam operations, said HerbalKing was the “number one worst spam gang on the internet” during 2007-08. At one point during its operation, HerbalKing may have accounted for over one third of all spam emails. SpamHaus then went on to work with the organizations:
- New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs
- Australian Communications and Media Authority
- U.S. FDA
- Office of Generic Drugs and Division of Pharmaceutical Analysis
- Chicago-based National Association of Boards of Pharmacy
- CastleCops, a non-profit group focused on Internet safety
- Marshall Software (NZ) Ltd.
In 2008 and after three million complaints to the US FTC the US courts issued a temporary injunction prohibiting Atkins and Smith from spamming and making false product claims, and also froze their assets pending a trial. That trial led to a $16m fine. In December 2009 the Australian Federal court issued a $210,000 penalty and in New Zealand he was fined a further $92,715.
After all this hard work very little will be achieved. Atkinson and Smith will not have to pay the US fines unless they travel to the US and the Australian and New Zealand fines could be paid from around one month revenue of their network. They will be back up online very soon and the process will have to start again to stop them.
This case helps to highlight the problem with current anti-spam laws. These try to locate and penalise the spammer. As this case proves, that is a lengthy and expensive job that takes the co-operation of several organisations. We feel that spam laws need to penalise the advertiser too. This is because while it is hard to find spammers such as the Atkinson and Smith, it is much easier to locate the advertisers that use spam. This is because the spam itself almost always has information on how to contact the advertiser. If the advertisers who use spam to advertise were penalised, then spam will be, if not stopped, then greatly reduced. Since much of spam advertises fraudulent products, the advertisers themselves can be prosecuted for fraud.
Posted in Email (spam and Malware) | View Comments
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