Two men have been sent to jail for five years for sending millions of spam e-mails, reports the New York Times.  This is great news for everyone who’s wasted time deleting c1@L15 and horny teenager messages from their inbox – at a total of ten years, these two get all the time they’ve wasted for thousands of others.

Jeffrey Kilbride and James Schaffer have been spamming since 2003, earning commissions by mailing links to various porn sites.

They attempted to escape prosecution by making it look like they sent the messages from Amsterdam, where as everybody knows nothing is illegal.  This was an interesting legal defense, basically saying "Yes we’re as guilty as sin but cyber cyber loophole you can’t touch us."  The court was unimpressed with the Sneakers-type shenanigans, and proved that they could touch them – and send them where others could too.

The charges included conspiracy, money laundering, fraud and transportation of obscene materials, making it clear the courts were adding everything they could think of to send these guys away. Unfortunately "wasting everyone’s time" isn’t a federal offense yet: think about it, these guys were sending messages to tell people that there is porn online.  Anybody who doesn’t know that by now is going to need ten foot letters of holy fire to drive the message home.

This is a success for the controversial Can-Spam law of 2003, which many have criticized for weakness in the face of its target.

The real problem is that the two earned over two million dollars (much of which they have been forced to give up), proving that hundreds of thousands of idiots still believe that Ben3242@not.spamipromise.dumbass is sending them links out of the goodness of his heart.  No matter how good the spam filters and laws get, as long as people keep opening the spam it’ll keep wasting our time.

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Entry was posted on Monday, October 15th, 2007 at 11:44 am under Crime, Legal, Spam.

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