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.""

I remembered:

[xtracto]

Bernie was talking to his friend Jack about his rebellious son Yossi. "When I was a youngster and did something wrong, my parents punished me by sending me to my bedroom without supper. I hated it. But our Yossi has his own colour TV, phone, computer and DVD player in his bedroom so we can't do that - it wouldn't be much of a punishment."
"So what do you do, then?" asked Jack.
"We send him up to our bedroom without supper!



When I was younger (on secondary and high school) my parents sometimes used to punish me sending me to my bedroom. Unfortunately the home PC was *in my bedroom* so I just made a sad face and went up there, turned on the computer and started programming for aaaaaaaall the rest of the day :) great days where those =op

Oh, and the mentioned text was from here [awordinyoureye.com]. I just remembered the passage but the page is the first that came on google :)

Reminds me of the "I love you" virus

[Moraelin]

Reminds me of the "I love you" virus, and all the idio... erm... computer-illiterate people who opened it because they genuinely thought that their boss/secretary/whole-fucking-department sent them a genuine love declaration. Or all the viruses that get opened because someone really thought that their long lost cousin Amir N'gbendu from Nigeria sent them a porn-video/incredible-investment-opportunity-sprea dsheets/whatever. Conveniently packed in an .exe file. It must be a self-extracting zip, really. Would your long lost cousin lie to you?

So being that some people _are_ that gullible, I wonder how many actually went and wrote their will, said goodbye to their loved ones, and arranged their own funerals, after reading "you're going to die in 7 days" in an email.

Wrong bedroom

[Old VMS Junkie]

They should make him stay in his parent's bedroom. Punish the kid for being a dope And punish his parents for raising an ignorant twerp.

And make him wear a sign.

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, make him wear one of those signs that states what he's done.

"I'm doing community service for sending millions of spam emails to you."

Then make him clean up public areas. Or better yet, make him walk around a mall, or a business district.

This type of behavior *thrives* on the anonymity of the Internet. Making his community or locality realize who he is and what he's done will take away the privilege of that anonymity. It would put a very strong and real consequence to his seemingly risk-free spammer actions.

Not Spam. Harassment.

[RagingFuryBlack]

What this kid did wasn't spam. He wasn't selling anything, wasn't soliciting personal information. He was harassing a former employer because for some reason he had a bone to pick with them. He tried to DoS their mail servers with death threats. If anything, this kid should be charged as a vandal and fined for the dammage and man-hours that it took to unclog the mail server and clear the accounts, as well as some well deserved community service either clearing royally screwed windows PCs of ad/spyware/viri from public PCs or by physically hard labor.

Death Threats?

[phorm]

Actually, this sounds like a death threat to me. Aren't there special punishments for things along those lines?

They don't take this so seriously in England

[Animats]

A few years ago, I got a student's misdirected message that said "I am going to kill you tonight". I received this because I own a domain in ".com" that's the same as a boarding school in ".co.uk", and some of the teenagers there haven't figured out the domain name system yet. This was shortly after Columbine, so it seemed important to do something. So I called up the school, after some difficulty got someone there after hours, and read them the message. They weren't too worried, explaining to me that it was a 13 year old sending the message.

In the US, a SWAT team would have been sent.

Re:Why spam works

[Kadin2048]

We'll keep one server running just for him. Maybe an old 386 with a single 14.4k baud modem.

Oh, and the connection resets every hour.