Spammers skirt on minor punishment

PCWorld has an article up relating that two spammers that were caught had to hand over their profits.

The key thing to note here is this quote from the article:

The defendants faced no charges under the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act, which went into effect January 1, because the spamming activity happen before CAN-SPAM became law, the FTC says.

There are other sites on the net complaining about how this is a bad thing since it shows that the courts aren't going to crack down on spammers and it sets a bad example.
But it clearly states there that these guys are grandfathered in to the system prior to the CAN-SPAM act and therefore are left to the rather lenient systems that were in place.

On a side note, the article states that they have to give back their profits - which doesn't clarify that statement later in the article.
Is it really just all profits? Not all revenues from the venture? So basically, they just have to show that they had massive operating expenses and therefore had very little profit and then they don't have to give much back.
Hopefully the way the courts define necessary operating expenses doesn't include company vehicles, office space, servers, user systems, meals, etc.

Otherwise, were these spammers smart, this punishment is phenomenally light due to the wording.

I wouldn't expect the upcoming CAN-SPAM trials to be so lenient - especially in light that we have already seen that the CAN-SPAM act is allowing ISPs to recover physical goods from the spammers in lieu of actually money (for the exact reason that I just mentioned above).

Posted by Eric at May 8, 2004 02:33 PM | TrackBack