Big Time Spammer Shut Down By CAN-SPAM

Found on Internet Week on Friday, 30 July 2004
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A federal court this week shut down a big-time Florida spammer and froze his assets, using the CAN-SPAM Act to put a stop to his mass mailings. Creaghan A. Harry is "responsible for what likely amounts to millions of illegal spam messages," said the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in a statement.

The FTC filed a complaint in a Chicago federal court July 21, alleging that Harry used a slew of tactics that violate the CAN-SPAM Act, including spoofing forging return addresses and sending messages through hijacked computers, dubbed "open proxies."

On Tuesday, a U.S. District Court Judge issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting Harry from further spamming and blocked his assets, which had been transferred to a bank account in Latvia. If Harry is convicted, those monies would be used to refund consumers who bought the phony products.

Wow, this is like, the first real use for this law. Being dubbed the solution for spam, they now managed to stop one big spammer. Ok, perhaps now everybody will get 1 spam less per day. This needs a technical solution; laws won't fix it.