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Internet and business news for the UK online, by Brian Turner

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December 20, 2004

Spammers hit news: charges, damages, and infected IP purcases

E-mail spammers make the headlines today in a string of stories.

For starters, CIS Internet Services, a small ISP focussed around Clinton, Iowa, was awarded $1 billion damages against 3 e-mail spammers, who according to Iowa law are fined $10 per Unsolicited Commercial E-mail sent.

At one point in 2000 the ISP was receiving up to 10 million spams a day - mostly directed to non-existent email addresses. The source of the addresses was a CDROM called Bulk Mailing 4 Dummies. This contained 2.8m email addresses supposedly for customers of CIS, as well as millions of addresses, mostly bogus, for the likes of AOL, Hotmail and Earthlink

More on that story here: Judge Awards $1 billion in Spam Lawsuit.

In the UK itself, Peter Francis Clifford Macrae, held to be one of Britain's worst spammers, is reported to be charged with a number of criminal offences, including blackmail, fraud and criminal damage.

Apparently using multiple pseudonyms constructed from his names, according to UK's biggest spammer charged with more offences, he is being charged for:

threats to kill, threatening to burn down a trading standards office that was investigating him, and making obscene phonecalls.
However, appearing at Huntingdon Magistrates court on Tuesday 14 December, he was also faced with a series of other charges including blackmail, transferring criminal property, criminal damage and running a business for fraudulent purposes have been added. He remains in police custody until his next court date in Peterborough today, Monday 20 December.

Macrae also faced an injunction from Nominet last month, prevents him from threatening Nominet's staff or even using the company Whois database of .uk domain owners.

If that wasn't enough to make the world of UCE look bad, a 16-year old youth escaped a prison sentence for distributing the Randex Trojan. According to the report Teenage British Trojan distributor escapes jail, once the machines were infected, their IPs were sold off to UCE spammers, so that they could access the machines for distrubuting spam.

Posted by brian_turner at December 20, 2004 07:34 PM

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December 20, 2004

Spammers hit news: charges, damages, and infected IP purcases

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