MySpace Sues Well-Known Spammer Who Supposedly Went Straight

from the off-the-wagon dept

A few years ago, self-proclaimed spam king Scott Richter agreed to settle a suit with Microsoft and, among other things, pay them $7 million. The move appeared to be one of Richter’s steps towards legitimacy, which wasn’t totally out of character, given that the book Spam Kings portrayed him as a guy who couldn’t decide whether to spam, or go legit. However, it looks like legitimacy has evaded him, as he’s been sued by MySpace, which alleges he and his associates gained access to a number of users’ accounts, then used them to send millions of pieces of spam selling items like ringtones and polo shirts. So, to answer our question of a year and a half ago: has Scott Richter really gone legit? It sure doesn’t sound like it.


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Comments on “MySpace Sues Well-Known Spammer Who Supposedly Went Straight”

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16 Comments
blaah says:

well if he’s the guy i’m thinking of he had a rather good operation going on… idiots(typical myspace user) would see ooooooo free ringtones and click on the link in there to the persons profile… on the profile the person edited the html and made it so it said “you must be logged in to do this”
what that actually did was send the guy all the persons account information…

so basically myspace should be thanking this guy for showing that the internet is only for those capable of using it so there you go

Anonymous Coward says:

Re: what?

what’s the difference between him spamming myspace and their own users doing it?


The difference is that he used phished accounts. So he exploited the trust users have of their friends by pretending to be their friends. Your analogy doesn’t fit because the spammer isn’t the one sending the actual bulletin. It would be better rewritten as:

“My cousin stole my girlfriend’s account information and sent out 200 of those stupid quizzes as my girlfriend.”

Rich Kulawiec says:

There is no such thing as

We’ve seen this movie before. Wallace & Rines claimed to “go legit”,
but then wound up involved in junk faxing and spyware. Richter claimed
to “go legit” but we’ve continued to see spam from his operations in our
spamtraps ever since.

This is probably why a call for the IDP was issued years ago:

http://groups.google.com/group/news.admin.net-abuse.email/msg/f4c5bdacdf17fb2

So while I’m no particular fan of MySpace, I applaud their efforts here.

jeff says:

Re: dis is stupid shit

well if he’s the guy i’m thinking of he had a rather good operation going on… idiots(typical myspace user) would see ooooooo free ringtones and click on the link in there to the persons profile… on the profile the person edited the html and made it so cheap battery it said “you must be logged in to do this”
what that actually did was send the guy all the persons account information…

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