AOL Awarded $7 Million From Spammer
from the that-sounds-good dept
Well, down goes another spammer. AOL has been awarded $7 million from a spamming operation that violated a court order to stop spamming their customers. It's good to see these large awards against spammers, as maybe it will make some spammers realize that it's not worth doing what they do. However, what's more likely to happen is that spamming technology will get even better, making it much more difficult to track these guys down.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Raising the barriers to entry
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Raising the barriers to entry
Recently I started receiving e-mails about those teeny-tiny remote control cars that are "the hot thing this Christmas" and I got 5 or 6 in one day all with the same contents but different return addresses and subject lines, but none of them contained information about actually getting a car. What a complete waste of bandwidth.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Bizarro world when I side with AOL
I still hold firm that the easy way to shut down a ton of spam is to go after the companies whose goods & services are promoted. They're paying for the spam "service" to get people to buy their stuff and there's almost always a way to contact them to give them your money. Make it illegal for them to pay for a service that sends out unsolicited email and you'll put a huge dent in the demand and most spammers will go out of "business."
And while the goofs or whatever that you guys mention when no contact information is provided would still get through, they seem to be the exception rather than the norm. Maybe it's a new trend, but I would have to guess that effectiveness drops buy a few orders of magnitude when there's no direct link to purchase so at some point, they should realize the return on investment isn't worth it and they'll go away.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]