After years of tweaking anti-spam filters on my personal email server, I have all but banished Nigerian dictators ads for “viagkra” from my mailbox. But almost every week I find dozens of emails, allegedly from various friends and business colleagues, exhorting me to join every new social networking site under the sun.

As if the thicket of companies out there trying to build the next MySpace or Facebook weren’t annoying enough, each new venture seems to have gotten even more aggressive than the next in making its users crack open their email address book and launch invitations to everybody they got business cards from at a cocktail party in 1997.

The earliest social networking sites learned the hard way – by being blocked as spam and reviled by would-be customers as pests – that aggressive viral marketing can cause explosive growth, but can also blow up in your face.

To read more, click here.

It’s been a bad couple of weeks for spammers in courts around the U.S.

On September 20, an Arizona appeals court upheld a lower court decision which found that the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) of 1991 does indeed apply to Short Message Service (SMS) spam sent to mobile phones.

The case, Joffe v. Acacia Mortgage Corp., is another victory for Rodney Joffe, my friend and a fellow co-conspirator in Whitehat.com.

According to the AP:

Acacia argued that it had only sent a message and did not “call” Joffe, but the Court of Appeals said that was an incomplete description of what the company did when it used e-mail to indirectly connect to Joffe’s cell phone and place a text message.

“Even though Acacia used an attenuated method to dial a cell phone telephone number, it nevertheless did so,” Judge Patricia K. Norris wrote for the panel.

Then, on September 22, we learned in late word from Oklahoma that one of today’s most prolific spammers, Robert Soloway, was ordered by a federal judge to pay more than $10 Million in statutory damages and has been permanently ordered to stop his spamming ways. Failure to heed the judge’s order can result in arrest, extradition to Oklahoma, and jail for contempt of court.

Careful readers of PrivacyClue will remember that Robert Soloway recently got on my bad side by sending out the text of a column I wrote, making it appear as if I had sent the spam. As a result of the court’s injunction, if Soloway sends any more spam in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act, he’s looking at jail time.

I’m sure his Mom is so proud!

Almost exactly 6 months to the day, after flying me to New York City for an interview with John Hockenberry in the luxurious Waldorf Towers, my Dateline NBC interview about spam is airing on Friday night.

You’ll have to check your local listings. And of course, the airing is contingent on there not being any new missing girls in Aruba, no plane crashes, or other more newsworthy event.

But after some false alarms, it appears to actually be happening this time. A friend of ours called excitedly this evening to say she was standing in her kitchen and heard my voice booming from a Dateline promo on her living room television. So it’s definitely happening! Unless it doesn’t. :)

Here’s a cameraphone picture of what I saw while sitting in the hotseat!

“SPAMIS.COM/.ORG/.CC/.INFO”, a/k/a Robert Soloway, has continued to send out spam containing the text of my monthly column for eSecurity Planet. It was not sent by me. It was not sent with my permission or authorization.

And please don’t send me complaints, copies of the spam, etc. I’m getting enough as it is, thanks!

In fact, looking at the spams that I have personally received (yes, the twit is spamming me with my own article…), he’s using a network of “spam zombies” — virus-infected and hacked PCs that are hijacked to relay spam. It’s a sign that this guy is a pretty sophisticated criminal. I’m sure his mother is very proud.

According to the SpamHaus “Registry of Known Spam Operations” here’s his latest info:

Mr. Robert Soloway
1200 Western Avenue
98101 Seattle
Washington
Tel: +1 (206) 226-9558 (206)223-1270
email: nim@cyberservices.com

Robert Alan Soloway
SPAMIS, PO Box 1259, Seattle, WA 98111, USA
Fax: (206)260-2409 or (503)213-6416

As of Nov 6, 2004, Robert Soloway’s NIM/Newport Internet Marketing is an active corporate entity in Washington State. This corporate name was registered in WA in Dec, 2003. Soloway’s “corporation” is run out of his apartment at the Harbors Apartments in Seattle.
–
Washington State Dept of Revenue
State Business Records Database Detail

TAX REGISTRATION NUMBER:…6024226472
UBI:…………………..6024226472
LEGAL ENTITY:…………..NEWPORT INTERNET MARKETING CORP
DOING BUSINESS AS:………NIM CORPORATION

MAILING ADDRESS:
1200 WESTERN AVE APT 17E
SEATTLE, WA 98101-2964

BUSINESS LOCATION:
1200 WESTERN AVE STE 17-E
SEATTLE, WA 98101-0000

OWNER TYPE:…………….CORPORATION
ACCOUNT OPENED:…………12/01/2003
ACCOUNT CLOSED:…………OPEN
STD INDUSTRIAL CODE:…….5961

Have fun!

According to Russian news agency Interfax (reported via MosNews.com), notorious Russian spammer Vardan Kushnir was found beaten to death in his Moscow apartment yesterday.

It’s not exactly the sort of penalty you wish on even the most incorrigible of spammers, but there must have been something more going on here. Even in what, by many accounts, is a lawless and out-of-control Russia, it’s difficult to believe that people would be so infuriated by spams for English-language training courses (the main business of Mr. Kushnir, apparently) that they would beat someone to death. A nickel says we’ll learn later that there was some Russian mob connection… just you watch.

Thank goodness that I live in America, where the morons who have been blaming me for spamming them this past week (which, of course, I didn’t!!!), are content to simply send whiny emails.