I spend anywhere from 2 to 5 hours each week on spam related issues. There are 150 employees in my medium sized company. If each of us only spends 2 hours a week deleting spam that is 15,000 hours a year (minus 2 weeks for vacation.) If our median wage is $10/hour (a VERY low estimate) the cost in lost manhours is $150,000. My parent company has 19,000 employees world wide. Applying the same hourly wage the associated cost of spam is $19,000,000 a year in lost man hours. That is a loose estimate for only one medium sized international company. 53 companies the same size would lose a 1,007,000,000 dollars (that is billion with a 'B'.) There are many, many more then 53 companies of that size around the world and these spammers hit every single one of them. I do not think the monetary penalty is that far out of line when you really think about the lost productivity dealing with the spam. As for the 9 year sentence, how long would you get if your stole $1,007,000,000 from 53 different banks?

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