Spam Will Eventually Kill Ya.

From the Net - Eddie Davidson was convicted as a spammer. He was caught sending out spam promoting certain penny stocks as a good investment. Because of his involvement in the operation, Davidson was sentence to 21 months in a federal prison.

After serving only 2 months of his 21 month sentence, he escaped. Just 4 days after he escaped from the federal minimum security prison he was found dead from a self inflicted gun shot wound.

Davidson had been cooperating with the FBI and acting as a consultant prior to his escape.

Karma?

 

Don't You Just Love Spam?

I have certain customers that love to sign up for "free offers" on the internet with their primary email address. About a week after they sign up for the "once in a lifetime deal", I get a call and listen to the woes of a person afflicted with self imposed "spamalotis." Yes I just made that up. Spamalotis is not really a word, but I bet The Big Bald Blog will index really well for it in a few days. But I digress.

Most of the time, I explain to them that all it takes is for their email address to get on one list, and it's all downhill from there. It seems like common sense but here are some things that you can do to avoid getting spam.

Don't take any "free IQ tests." This one seems to be the inbox killer that most people fall for. If you HAVE TO provide your email address to complete an online transaction or you want to sign up for something, USE AN ALTERNATE EMAIL. Go get yourself a Hotmail, Yahoo, or Gmail and use that email every time you are required to provide an email address. Save your primary email address for professional correspondence.

ITnews reports that a new spam site is found every 3 seconds. "New figures suggest that 92.3 percent of all email sent globally during the first three months of 2008 was spam." Yes you read that right. 92.3% of all the email sent was spam. Wow, what a staggering amount. "The data from the study also indicated that 23,300 new spam-related web pages were created every day during the period, or one about every three seconds."

I have a discussion board on another site and I always thought it was strange that I got a ton of spammy sign-ups from .ru domains. The ITnews report also said that, "...the number of spam messages sent from compromised Russian computers has more than doubled over the past year.

In the first quarter of 2007, Russia was in tenth position in the chart, relaying just three per cent of the world’s spam. Today this figure stands at 7.4 percent."

There are all kinds of free spam killer options out there as well as ones you pay for, but the more you protect your primary email address the better off you will be.

 

Finally - Spammers Get What They Deserve!

The Associated Press reports that, Jeffrey Kilbride, 41, of Venice California, and James Schaffer, also 41, of Paradise Alley, Arizona, were sentenced to 72 months and 63 months in prison, respectively, fined $100,000 and were ordered to pay $77,500 in restitution to AOL. They also were ordered to forfeit over $1.1 million in commissions they made spamming inboxes with pornographic emails.

They sent millions of unsolicited e-mails, prosecutors said. During nine months in 2004, Kilbride, Schaffer and an associate transmitted more than 600,000 spam messages advertising pornographic Web sites, according to court documents. Even after Congress passed the law called the CAN-SPAM act, the 2 perps continued sending email via remote servers in Amsterdam. The authorities were able to track the spam back to the individuals in Phoenix.

To prove that there is no honor in spamming, 3 other individuals that were involved, turned on Kilbride and Schaffer and testified against them in court to in order to avoid prosecution themselves.

YES! I love to hear stories like this. Obviously there is some big money to be made in spam, I have always wondered how much people make spamming and why they do it. Now that those 2 are going to be in a prison cell for quite some time, someone needs to go to the door of their cell every 5 minutes and scream at the top of their lung, "Click here to see the hottest girls on the net."