Start a home business, get rich quick, win financial freedom! If you watch late-night TV, you've heard it all before. But what's the story behind these slick pitchmen and their dubious schemes? Enter The Salty Droid, your ornery metal guide to the corrupt underworld of scam-marketing scum. This charmingly acerbic bot (owned and operated by mild-mannered Chicago dog-lover Jason Michael Jones [inter-view, long talk + transcript]) is a valiant crusader against the vile con-men who bankrupt the elderly and the desperate with beautiful lies. Exposed so far: A shadowy "Syndicate" of frauduct-pushing personality cults polluting the media with blogspam and woo-woo talking points. Boiler rooms in the Utah desert where telemarketers farm credit from easy targets with cunning, probing scripts [PDF]. Powerful politicians bought wholesale. Believers left to die in fraudulent new-age vision quests. It's a soul-crushing beat, enough to make one feel like a regular catcher-bot in the digital rye. But somebody's got to do it -- preferably someone with plasma nunchucks and titanium skin.
posted by Rhaomi on Aug 31, 2011 - 47 comments

Register article on Greek arrest of well known programmer I'ved been watching this story since it surfaced at the rixstep.com page here and here; also covered at Techdirt.com in a couple of threads. Worth a look.
posted by hank on Nov 2, 2005 - 16 comments

Microsoft, AOL, Earthlink, Yahoo sue hundreds in six lawsuits More here (registration req'd). Nation's largest spammers targeted in first lawsuits under Congressional Anti-Spam Legislation.
posted by mcgraw on Mar 10, 2004 - 29 comments

Italian spammers face jail. The ruling follows estimates by the European Commission that spam e-mails cost EU companies approximately 2.25bn euros in lost productivity last year.
posted by MintSauce on Sep 4, 2003 - 7 comments

Judge orders VeriSign to stop ad campaign A U.S. court on Tuesday ordered Internet naming giant VeriSign Inc. to immediately cease a direct-mail campaign that used what a rival called deceptive advertising to poach its customers. A development in an earlier posted story.
posted by timeistight on May 16, 2002 - 7 comments

What Would This Do To the 'Net? Would such legislation be Constitutional?
posted by ParisParamus on Mar 28, 2001 - 13 comments

The Washington State Anti-Spam law found unconstitutional because the person named in the suit was in Oregon, and the law can't be enforced across state boundries. Damn. As if your location means anything on the internet. What a lame ruling.
posted by mathowie on Mar 28, 2000 - 8 comments