How Do You Punish a 16-year-old Spammer?

An anonymous reader writes "A 16 year old 'Boy Spammer', David Lennon, has been told by a judge that as punishment for his crimes he can't leave his bedroom for two months during curfew. CNET thinks this is no punishment at all: "With the streets awash with axe murderers, terrorists and paedophiles, staying in and playing games seems like a reasonable response. Given that our kids are growing up as stay-in gamers, the Boy Spammer's curfew is no more punishment for the blighter than sentencing a boy caught speeding to two months on a race track." Apparently Lennon used a piece of email bombing software called Avalanche to wreak revenge on his ex-employer, Domestic and General Group. His five million emails contained the message "You will die in seven days.""

Re:easy punishment

[milamber3]

If you RTFA or even the summary instead of just the headline you would see he was not really spamming in the sense you are talking about. He email bombed someone for revenge. Seems more akin to a DoS attack on the email server than spamming.

16? Nope.

[no.17]

He's electronically tagged, although the curfew times are a joke- 12.30-7.30am weekdays and 13.30-10.00 on weekends. When the little blighter will be alseep...he's a teenager for crying out loud!

Oh and he is not 16, he was 18 (here [cio.com], and here [silicon.com]) but is now 19 (here [irishdev.com]).

He has been named and located [irishdev.com] though ....so any really irate ex-work buddies dont have far to look...

Re:Not spam

[oliverthered]

Not only that but he got off at the first trial because the email system was designed to recieve email so he didn't break into the system or misuse it.

There was an appeal against this descision to which he plead guilty. (Quite why he did so I can't even begin to guess)

Re:*snort*

[machine of god]

Half a line of lyrics in google is sufficient to find the track name and artist.

What's the problem?

[FishandChips]

This is England. The "judge" would have been a lay magistrate, just a member of the public with special training. Not, anyway, a professional lawyer who would probably have had to ask "What is the internet?", assuming the hearing was held before lunch and therefore that the "judge" was still relatively sober.

The apparent leniency of this sentence might have something to do with the aggrieved party, a large company, initially demanding 29,000 pounds in compensation from a sixteen-year-old boy, not a very nice or proportionate thing to do. This demand by the prosecution was dropped during the trial. It's possible that the magistrates were showing that bullying of this kind is not on, in England, and that if this company's mail servers could be so easily knocked over by a sixteen year-old, they couldn't have been much good in the first place.

Computer specialists might object to the idea, but lay magistrates are partly there to reflect public opinion, and public opinion doesn't hold computers in very high regard.

Simpsons Reference

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa's_Date_with_Dens ity#Homer.27s_.22Happy_Dude.22_scam [wikipedia.org]

"Hello, this is Homer Simpson aka Happy Dude! The court has ordered me to call every person in town to apologize for my telemarketing scam. I'm sorry. If you can find it in your heart to forgive me, send one dollar to : Sorry Dude, 742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield. You have the power!"

Simpson's references are funny. So funny that they can get parent posts modded Funny. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if this post was modded funny. You might think it is Informative, but you are the only one who didn't get the joke.