Another major spam prosecution
February 18th, 2011 at 3:34 pm by David FarrarNZPA report:
An Auckland man and his company could face penalties totaling $700,000 for allegedly sending out hundreds of thousands of spam emails and text messages.
Brendan Paul Battles and Image Marketing Group Limited are accused of sending 519,545 spam emails and 44,824 spam text messages during 2009.
The text messages allegedly asked recipients to purchase a mobile phone antenna booster over the internet.
Department of Internal Affairs’ Anti-Spam Compliance Unit has lodged two statements of claim in the High Court in Auckland alleging breaches under the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007 by Battles and Image Marketing Group Limited.
The department is seeking financial penalties against Battles of $200,000 and $500,000 against his company for sending unsolicited messages.
Few in the anti-spam community will be surprised that Brendan Battles is the identity of the person being prosecuted. He was a major spammer in the US, and while he claimed to have given up spamming when he moved here, the evidence pointed the other way.
I wonder if he has NZ residency? If not then I say deport him after fining him.
Related posts:
- First spam prosecution for New Zealand
- Faxes now covered by anti-spam law
- Yay – a spam conviction
- Spam Prosecution
February 18th, 2011 at 3:44 pm
Strip every cent from him and then turf him out whether or not he has residency.
Vote:February 18th, 2011 at 3:47 pm
^this.
Vote:February 18th, 2011 at 3:48 pm
“… I say deport him after fining him.”
You mean, assuming this currently innocent person is found guilty before a court of law, I trust
Vote:February 18th, 2011 at 4:11 pm
He should also be required to make a hand-written letter of apology to everyone he spammed.
Vote:February 18th, 2011 at 4:19 pm
One more small business man trying to earn a buck being persecuted by luddites.
Vote:February 18th, 2011 at 4:35 pm
Antenna Booster, well hand on heart that is spam I have never received. Jobs, 4 week degrees, penis enlargement, foreign brides, towels, drugs, replica watches, updating of bank account details (I don’t hold) billions of dollars from wealthly people that have died in plane crashes in Africa (but have no relatives) but bank workers with a conscience who want to spread the wealth around well then yes I can say I get emails on a daily basis from. Hangings to good for him, he needs to sit in from of a PC and reply to every spam email he receives saying ‘No thank you, please don’t send me a email again’.
Vote:February 18th, 2011 at 5:15 pm
Bastard. I paid good money to get the stuff that would get my antenna pointing skyward.
Never worked.
Deport the arsehole.
Vote:February 18th, 2011 at 5:33 pm
Oh shit just when you all needed those penis enlargement and make it harder stuff in your sad lives. Still at least I didn’t get any for breast enlargements although I’ll bet MNIJ is pissed cause he replied to all those ones and they didn’t work. what a sight MNIJ with enlarged breasts and enlarged penis all at the same time.
Vote:Even Phool couldn’t better that.
!
Oh well there’s justice in the world sometimes.
February 18th, 2011 at 5:42 pm
I took one of those blue pills bought off the internet once. I chocked on it and got a stiff neck
Vote:February 18th, 2011 at 5:49 pm
And yet phool roams free after posting 10,000 spams soliciting for whore.co.nz
Vote:February 18th, 2011 at 5:59 pm
What about Vodafone? When will they be prosecuted for spamming?
Vote:February 18th, 2011 at 6:03 pm
Have you seen “The birth of Nokia” then MR?
Very kinky.
Vote:February 18th, 2011 at 6:10 pm
Spammers must be the most pessimistic people on the planet, since they think everyone in the world has poor cellphone reception, bad credit, can’t get a real degree, can’t get a real job, has a weight problem, needs prozac and can’t get it up.
Vote:February 18th, 2011 at 7:08 pm
Actually that would be a nice irony – if someone sent Philu some unsolicited tinned meat as a reward for this work on KB
Vote:February 18th, 2011 at 7:23 pm
Put it away (1,505) Says:
February 18th, 2011 at 6:10 pm
Spammers must be the most pessimistic people on the planet, since they think everyone in the world has poor cellphone reception, bad credit, can’t get a real degree, can’t get a real job, has a weight problem, needs prozac and can’t get it up.
No.. They are quite the opposite…
They target the optomists..
Vote:I can get it up.. I can lose weight and still eat like a pig.. Of course I have a degree in Nuclear what ever.. ..
February 18th, 2011 at 9:03 pm
Email spam is a pain. But you can filter it out.
Vote:Whereas unsolicited Faxs are exempt from the spam laws.
February 19th, 2011 at 7:29 am
Liberty (12) Says:
February 18th, 2011 at 9:03 pm
Email spam is a pain. But you can filter it out.
Whereas unsolicited Faxs are exempt from the spam laws.
Unsolicited faxes are theft of fax paper.
Prosecute accordingly.
Vote:February 19th, 2011 at 8:29 am
$700,000 in PENALTIES for running a direct marketing business? Fuck! Spam is annoying, admittedly, but its hardly mass murder and to face that kind of penalty for (as MyNameIsJack so rightly says) being a small businessman trying to earn a buck is idiotic.
How is ‘spam’ worse than any other kind of advertising? What about radio…. TV….. the same applies across the board; most of the time its just as mindless and annoying. Advertising is advertising.
If you pay good money to buy a newspaper or a magazine and it is filled with ‘unsolicited’ advertising then thats worse than ‘spam’, isn’t it, because it has actually cost you money to recieve it.
Get a bloody life!
Vote:February 19th, 2011 at 8:56 am
Anyone who thinks a spammer is a small businessman trying to earn a buck is idiotic.
And anyone who thinks it doesn’t cost you money to receive it simply has no idea of how much spammers have cost the world and every internet user.
Vote:February 19th, 2011 at 9:03 am
Alan, I’m not talking about people who write viruses which fuck up computers worldwide. Virus writers should be tortured to death in excruciating pain, their families should be hunted down and herded into slave colonies and their children should be eaten alive by crocodiles of course…. but why are we so fucken precious about someone who simply delivers sales messages via elecronic media?
Vote:February 19th, 2011 at 9:07 am
OK, Alan Wilkinson, how much has spam cost you, personally?
I get a bit, not too much, and the cost to me is four fifths of five eighths of fuck all.
Vote:February 19th, 2011 at 9:27 am
MNIJ, we built and sold a company that protected email from viruses and spam for $50M. You helped pay for that, thanks.
Dave, 80% of worldwide email traffic is spam. It multiplies the cost of networks and servers by 4 before you add on the cost of filtering systems which probably double it again.
Vote:February 19th, 2011 at 10:02 am
Alan, I asked how much spam cost you; you replied you appear to have profited from it. Not that bad, then, is it?
I see this “80% of worldwide email traffic is spam” all the time, but am yet to see any valid research to support it. Smells to me just like the claims for billion dollar losses due to music and movie file sharing. A myth.
Email is an incredibly cost effective way to advertise. And like all direct advertising, the better atrgetted, the better the result. Why should businesses be denied use of this communication tool?
Vote:February 19th, 2011 at 10:10 am
MT Tinman
Vote:My point is you can’t stop unsolicited faxs . Whereas you can stop spam.
So why weren’t faxs included in the anti spam law?
February 19th, 2011 at 10:59 am
MNIJ, nope, not a myth. I have no problem with targeted business mail.
I have a problem with people who send literally millions of emails to people who don’t want them and can’t stop them in order to get a few tens of responses from idiots – some of which wind up losing control of their credit cards, computers and identities.
I have even more of a problem with the Russian government mafia who profit from, support and protect these criminals.
Vote:February 19th, 2011 at 11:22 am
The Costs of Spam: How Spam Affects Your Bottom Line
According to a study by the Radicati Research Group Inc., a research firm based in Palo Alto, California, spam costs businesses $20.5 billion annually in decreased productivity as well as in technical expenses. Nucleus Research estimates that the average loss per employee annually because of spam is approximately $1934.
Predictions for the future costs of spam don’t look any brighter. It is estimated that 58 billion junk emails will be sent every day within the next four years, a figure that will cost businesses some $198 billion annually.
However, some researchers believe that based on an estimated current cost of $49 annually per inbox, the total cost of spam for businesses will balloon to $257 billion per year if spam continues to flourish at its current rate.
Source: http://www.spamlaws.com/spam-stats.html
Vote:February 19th, 2011 at 11:35 am
Dave: ” I’m not talking about people who write viruses which fuck up computers worldwide”
Actually, you are. Most of these spammers hire botnets to send their rubbish from, which have been created in exactly the way you describe. Otherwise antispam blacklists soon block their source sites.
Vote:February 19th, 2011 at 11:54 am
Alan Wilkinson (875) Says:
February 19th, 2011 at 10:59 am
MNIJ, nope, not a myth. I have no problem with targeted business mail.
You may not, but the law does.
I can target a market, fully research it and then send snail mail, make phone calls, fax, knock on the door, in fact, do anything at all that I can think of to get my message in front of a prospect, except use the single most cost effective way – email. Why is that?
Vote:February 19th, 2011 at 11:57 am
Thrash, none of your sources look like independent, unbiased researchers – they are all attempting to sell products/services based on creating a perception of a spam problem. I think I’d rather see some independent, non biased research
Vote:February 19th, 2011 at 12:19 pm
The difference is that people can usually “opt out” of direct marketing, whereas spam you cannot (a reply merely confirms the validity of the address). And most if not all their “products” are bogus or scams. Also as Alan said, spammers attempt to get around filters by using botnets and people’s own email contact lists, which is a complete violation of privacy.
Fortunately, the bigger email hosts like gmail now have effective spam filters so they don’t have to enrage people as much as they did in about 10 years ago, but because email has a very low cost for the internet end user, spam has become a tremendous cost to the internet as a whole. It’s a perfect example of a Tragedy of the commons.
Vote:February 19th, 2011 at 12:32 pm
How about some anecdotal stuff. One mail server I administer gets around 20,000 e-mails a month. Around 60% of that is classed as spam. Fortunately most of it gets blocked or dropped before it gets into the system. We pay a few thousand dollars a year for the service that does the filtering.
Another e-mail server I administer gets connections trying to send spam every day which number from the low hundreds to the thousands. I’d say it averages around 500 connections. Again, most of these get dropped pretty smartly. Legitimate e-mail for this server is in the low hundreds on a daily basis. Some spam does get through the internet facing filters and then get stopped by our secondary filters. I go through these on a daily basis and release any which are legitimate and delete the rest. Very, very little actually gets to the users’ mailboxes.
You may not be receiving a lot but that’s probably because there is an ongoing effort behind the scenes to ensure that as little as possible reaches your inbox.
Vote:February 19th, 2011 at 12:48 pm
Also, just a note about cold-calling marketers. With the advent of cheap call centre farms in the developing world based on IP telephony (another low-cost medium similar to email) They are becoming the new spam. Just the other night I received a call from an unknown fellow who had clearly picked my name out of the white pages by the way he addressed me, and who, when I asked him if he was selling or marketing a product, said “no, no, no, no, I am from the computer maintenance department”. *rolls eyes*
Vote:I told him not to call me and hung up.
February 19th, 2011 at 1:16 pm
The difference is that people can usually “opt out” of direct marketing, …
How do you opt out of mail? Phone calls?
Vote:February 19th, 2011 at 1:17 pm
How about some anecdotal stuff.
Sorry, the plural of anecdote is not data.
Vote:February 19th, 2011 at 2:06 pm
“How do you opt out of mail? Phone calls?”
The the old DMA used to have a register for people who do not want unsolicited commercial mail and telemarketing. I believe that a direct phone marketer must keep a record of people who request not to be contacted (not 100% sure of this one as the the new DMN seems to have removed their Code of practice from public access).
In any case – notwithstanding jurisdictional issues between nations – there should always be an opt out, whether required by law or industry code of practice. I don’t see email as being fundamentally different in this sense.
Vote:February 19th, 2011 at 10:56 pm
OK, so how can I ‘opt out’ of continually hearing about penis enlargement and quack herbal remedies for non-existant maladies in the mainstream media then? I repeat … Stop being so bloody precious and get a life.
Vote: