CAUCE North America Inc.--The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (http://CAUCE.org)--Today announced at The Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group meeting (MAAWG) that it has received additional financial support from Return Path Inc. 

Facebook won an immense judgement against Montreal, Canada spammer and phisher Adam Guerbuez.

Guerbuez has a storied history, having been found arrested for uttering threats in 1997, charged with murder in 2000, faced marjuana charges in 2004 and perhaps most interestingly his online presence which began in 2003, he interviewed in the Montreal Mirror about his bum-fighting (homeless people paid to beat one another) websites crazypricks.com and bumvision.com. Currently he runs ballervision.com

Facebook's lawyers submitted this affidavit to the court outlining the character of Mr. Guerbuez, including his involvement with Neo-Nazi groups, and his criminal past.

CAUCE has been quoted today in the aftermath

NewsFactor Network

CTV

CAUCE President John levine also has some commentary on his personal blog
The Globe and Mail quotes Federal Task Force on Spam member Michael Geist regarding the lack of Canadian spam law and enforcement.

The Montreal Gazette makes note of Guerbuez' notorious past

Mr. Guerbuez's personal blog refutes any notoriety.

In an article published by the Technology Liberation Front, Cato Institute adjunct scholar Tim Lee dissects a recent argument by the American Civil Liberties Union regarding free speech & anti-spam laws.

It's been interesting to watch the ACLU wrestle with anti-spam legislation. Their entire purpose is to work through the legal system to protect our civil rights, as defined in the First Amendment -- which is why I've been a card-carrying member since before I was old enough to vote -- so of course they're going to push back against any perceived abridgment of the right to free speech, including anonymous speech. Yet as Tim Lee argues, the amount of speech afforded to spammers before they run afoul of the Virginia statue is enormous: "someone may (a) send out an unlimited number of emails using a real email address, (b) send out 9999 emails per day (99,999 per month, 999,999 per year) while falsifying email headers, or (c) send out an unlimited number of emails with falsified addresses to people who have previously consented to receive them."

In order to violate this Virginia statute, you have to be very bad. In order to violate CAN-SPAM & get even more federal attention, you have to be even worse. Anyone with a real need for free, anonymous speech will have a myriad of other, simpler, and very likely cheaper avenues available to them -- including, unfortunately, sending 9999 forged, unsolicited emails each & every day.

The Washington Post reports that the U.S. Senate has passed legislation that would allow law enforcement to go after a much larger percentage of modern online crime. Specifically, it will:

• remove the requirement that each affected individual must have suffered at least $5,000 in damages
  
• "make it a felony to install spyware or keystroke-monitoring programs on 10 or more computers regardless of the amount of damage caused"
  
• give identity theft victims the ability to seek restitution
  
• criminalize attempts to extort companies by threatening to publish stolen information
  

These provisions were added to an unrelated bill, the Former Vice President Protection Act, which must next be voted on by the House of Representatives before it becomes law.

CAUCE is very pleased that the Senate has taken this action to protect people living within the United States, and particularly support the provisions adding a private right of action against the criminals who prey upon all of us daily.

They say (whoever "they" are) that good things come in threes, and that certainly seems true for law enforcement against spammers this week.

In New York, Adam Vitale was sentenced to 30 months in prison and ordered to pay $183,000 in restitution for a week of spamming AOL back in 2005. He's also allegedly linked to advertisements for prostitution on craigslist, and is already in jail for even worse crimes.

In Illinois, an FTC settlement requires Spear Systems and company executives Bruce Parker and Lisa Kimsey to give up $29,000, stop making "false or unsubstantiated claims about health benefits" of their products, and bars them from violating CAN-SPAM ever again. Related litigation continues against defendants in Quebec and Australia; you may remember this gang as the hoodia spammers.

And finally, in Seattle, the Robert Soloway case continues. He pled guilty back in March to wire fraud, CAN SPAM fraud, and tax evasion, but not identity theft -- which was dismissed. Even so, he could be sentenced to up to 20 years, though that's reportedly unlikely. The difficulty for the judge appears to be that there isn't a lot of precedent for how long spammers should spend in jail. CAUCE would encourage Judge Marsha Pechman to look for precedents from other, non-internet-related fraud cases, multiply by the number of victims, and throw away the key.

But what makes the Soloway case particularly interesting is what else is being revealed. Soloway's business model was to sell advertising services, promising that all of his recipients had opted in -- even though none of them had, so it was 100% spam. This reportedly earned him over $1 million in a 3-year period, along with many extremely unhappy customers and nearly $18 million in judgements thus far.

So that's three more down, but many more to go.

(Note on the Soloway case: CAUCE President John Levine testified for the prosecution during both the trial and the sentencing.)