Good Guys 1 - Bad Guys 0

Some excellent news from the USA today, in the form of a Federal Grand Jury Indictment of Robert Solway. This is a name that isn't likely to be immediately familiar to you, but it's oh-so-familiar to this bear, who for ten years has been waging the war against spam.

Solway owns a company called "Newport Marketing", and he's the lowlife who harvested your email address, either by scanning websites, or by infecting your friend's computer with a virus and stealing it from their address book.

He's also the mongrel who's been sending billions of emails to you every day, cloggin up the web network and swamping mine, yours and just about everyone elses mailbox with ads for viarga, mortgages, stocks and other crap you're not interested in.

My first run-in with Solway came about 5 years ago, not long after I started my little internet company. An otherwise reputable company had been sucked in by Solway's advertising of "Mass Email Marketing Campaigns" to "Strictly Opt-In" recipients. I wrote to that company advising them that they had committed a criminal offence in Australia. You see, under a largely toothless piece of legislation called the Australian Spam Act, it's a crime to traffic in mailing lists that have been harvested by electronic means. It's the only part of the law that has any real bite, and because most of the spam we get comes from outside Australia, our Parliament added a clause which set down that so long as the recipient of spam email was in Australia, any offence under the Act, including the sending of spam or the sale/purchase of lists, would be deemed to have been committed within Australia.

That led me to Solway because it was relatively simple to suggest that, unless the company sending me the spam revealed the source of the list, they risked prosection under the Act. It helped that Australia and the USA have a robust extradition treaty, and that, at the time, someone in Texas had been arrested for some sort of electronic fraud and was being sent down-under.

Sadly, approaches to Solway and Newport Marketing to remove email addresses from their lists had absolutely no effect. This scum just kept on doing what he was doing, with utter disregard for the damage he was doing or the cost to anyone else of him doing it.

His activities got so bad that Microsoft won a US$7m civil judgement against him, as did a small Oklahoma internet provider (awarded $10m). Did that stop him? No. He just went on spamming. He couldn't give a stuff.

Well maybe he'll be a little more concerned now, because he's been charged with

• mail fraud,
• wire fraud,
• email fraud,
• aggravated identity theft,
• and money laundering.

These are serious charges, folks, and if found guilty, he faces decades as a guest of the US Federal Department of Corrections (which, when I was growing up, I always thought was the government agency that would correct my homework if I lived in America, but that's for another blog).

If you think 20 years is harsh for sending out "free" email, think about this...

It's been estimated that about 40% of all email traffic globally is spam. In 2006, that meant around 12.4 billion emails per day. Yes. 12.4 BILLION SPAM EMAILS PER DAY!

The cost of that to the world economy can be measured threefold.

First, there's the cost of increased capacity needed in the infrastructure to make sure spam doesn't drown the web and grind it to a halt (which it almost did, for a time, in 2003). Who do you think pays for all that? Yup. You and me.

Next, there's the cost of the bandwidth consumed. It doesn't directly effect you if you have an "unlimited" web access plan, but if you don't, that means some of the megabytes you pay for are stolen from you by the spammers. It's the same as someone stealing a couple of cents out of your bank account every month, or sneaking your car out for a drive to the shops and back when you're not watching, and not bothering to replace the fuel they've just used.

Finally, there's the cost to global productivity, and here's some more of The Bear's marvelous Arithmetic in Very Big Numbers just to make sure you're paying attention...

Let's take the 12.2 billion spam emails sent each day last year, and let's assume that spam filters catch about 50% of them. For the sake of round numbers, let's call it six billion spam emails getting through each day. Let's say it takes a second for someone somewhere to deal with each email (the actual estimate, by the way, is an average of 4.7 seconds, but for these calculations, let's just stick with 1). That's six billion seconds wasted globally each day. At $10 an hour, that's around $10.7million dollars each day, or around $3.9 billion a year in lost productivity. That $10 is very conservative, by the way.

Solway is accused of sending about 20% of the world's spam, which means he's stolen $780million dollars from us.

Now ask yourself what sort of prison time this low-life deserves.