Re:Interesting what started this (Score 2)

0x0d0a didst speak thusly:

The SEC also went after Rice, the guy that hired her. Everything got covered. I've seen attempts to sue spammers, to complain to them, to flood their phones, to complain to local police/attorney general. Nothing does much...except this. Seems that the first effective clean sweep against a spammer that I've ever seen -- and it was done by a black hat. Frankly, I'm quite pleased.

Actually, not quite the first clean sweep...

The first clean sweep I am aware of, or rather clue-by-fouring en masse, was of a particularly notorious spammer (both Usenet and email) by name of "Krazy" Kevin Lipsitz (notation in the Spam Timeline here: http://keithlynch.net/spamline.html).

Krazy Kevin was one of the parties that directly lead to confirmation of accounts--he used to use Compuserve throwaway accounts in particular, as I recall, to promote his magazine scheme.

It came out after a while on many net.abuse forums that not only was he spamming, but he also failed to deliver magazines...

Eventually the State of New York spanked him in probably one of the first court precedents in regards to spam. (Reference here: http://www.oag.state.ny.us/internet/litigation/leb edeff.html)

This all happened around '96 or '97...Krazy Kev was busted around 1997ish.

"Krazy Kevin" no longer is spamming, and apparently makes much of his living now being a professional gourmand (he apparently holds a world's record for consuming the most amount of pickles in a five-minute span, and is a regular contestant at the Nathan's hot-dog eating contest)...at least it's a bit more honest a way of life than spamming, I suppose. :) (More about Krazy Kev going honest, in a sense: http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/WolfFiles/wolffi les204.html) Still selling magazines too, but hopefully people get them now :)

Sanford, aka "Spamford", Wallace also was whacked into sense between being sued by both AOL *and* Compuserve (pre-merger) and getting ordered not to spam them (info on that lawsuit here: http://www.netlitigation.com/netlitigation/cases/c ompucase.htm)--and having literally been nearly banned from the Internet entirely and causing one of the major "backbone" sites of the Internet to be nearly universally shunned as well (the Agis.net UDP around 1996--Wallace and the nancy.com spammers were almost completely responsible) after it ended up being the last site on the Internet to deal with him...

In fact, Sanford Wallace has the rather dubious distinction of not only having been the reason behind many states' proposed antispam statutes, not only does he have the dubious distinction of having also been a junk faxer before he went into spamming and being almost singlehandedly responsible for the US law prohibiting junk faxing, but is singlehandedly responsible for much if not most of the early case law in regards to spamming...

After having realised the errors of his ways around 1998 or so, he started running an opt-in mail service for a while and (in a theme that seems to recur among reformed spammers) also apparently does entertainment, specifically, he's a DJ (more info here: http://www.canismajor.demon.co.uk/antispam/sanford .htm; info regarding his present company here: http://www.annonline.com/interviews/970522/biograp hy.html)...

(Now, mind, I've just included the first two cases I can recall off the top of my head involving people being sued directly for stuff related to spamming...)