On Wed, 24 Sep 2003, Kee Hinckley wrote:
With the possible exception of the new California law, I've yet to see any case in which the benefit from nailing a spammer (in terms of damages, or even reduced attacks) comes even close to covering the amount of time it took to find and pursue them. I doubt even the big ISPs recover their cost--their goal seems to be deterrence. However I'd be happy to donate somewhere.com's bogus inbound traffic (we bounced ten million messages last year, definitely looking at more than twenty million this year) to the cause.
How does $250,000 sound? :-) http://www.internetnews.com/IAR/article.php/3075271 Tracking them down can be time consuming. It's not impossible though and in many cases it's unbelievably easy. Getting a judgement is apparently the easy part. Getting your money seems to be the hard part. I've thought about using Kansas's anti-spam law myself but haven't yet. I know very little about the legal system. Even though my claim would be made in Small Claims Court, I'm leery about not going about the suit in the right way. Kansas's law allows providers to sue as well though. Receiving 25,000 copies of the same spam makes winning a court case quite profitable. We need more people that take this step IMHO. Justin