HoS on Spammers

Pleased to see a newspaper devoting an editorial to the case of the alleged NZ spammers:

Even the most liberal among us might find the phrase “hanging’s too good for them” leaping to our lips when we read about the case of the Christchurch-based spammers.

Send in DIck Cheney I say!

The men sent more than two million emails to New Zealand addresses in 2007, though presumably they spammed a lot of people overseas too, since they made $3.3 million for their “work”, which would have meant $1.65 a delivery if it had been only local.

Yes, they would have sent billions globally during that time. Response rates are well below 0.1%

Nice work if you can get it? Not really. Even the most intermittent web user detests spammers as something akin to pond scum, not least because they seem to have such a low opinion of their target market: they assume, for example, that all of us – including women – are deeply disaffected with the size of our penises and will happily drop what we are doing so we can sign up for a herbal enlargement programme run by con artists in Mauritius.

They are pond scum. And the best thing that will come from the court case is getting their pictures in the media. It was community disdain in 2003 that got Atkinson to at least publicly claim to stop spamming.

Regrettably the court will have to apply the law, but if ever there was a case in which the punishment should fit the crime, this is it.

Let the young men keep their $200,000. Let them handwrite (no photocopies, please) apologies to every household – wired or not, just to be sure – in the country.

And let them deliver them. By hand. On foot.

I like the way they are thinking!