Spammers are sociopaths. I’ve often said so. Friends and colleagues sometimes consider my views a little over the top, but here’s my shibboleth… would you want your daughter to marry a spammer?

I don’t know about you, but I think spammers are below used car salesmen on the food chain. I think the people who hire spammers are below used car salesmen, too. I think that someone should publish lists of the companies that hire spammers and include the names and addresses of their employees, not unlike Megan’s Law websites requiring registered sex offenders.

Companies could brag, “Spammers and people who have ever hired spammers will never work for us.”

Come to think about it, I think it insults the food chain to include spammers among them.

eWeek reports:

Convicted penny stock e-mail hustler Eddie Davidson kills his wife and young daughter before taking his own life just days after escaping from a federal minimum security prison.

Convicted spam king Eddie Davidson has committed suicide after killing his wife and 3-year-old daughter, according to media reports. Just five days ago, Davidson, the infamous online hustler of penny stocks, escaped from federal prison in Florence, Colo.

According to a story by the Denver Post, Davidson, 35, was found dead in the driveway of a home near Bennett, Colo., an apparent gunshot suicide victim. In a 2006 silver Toyota Sequoia located in the driveway, authorities found the bodies of Davison’s wife and toddler, also gunshot victims. An unidentified teenager survived the killing spree, as did an infant in the backseat of the SUV.

Davidson escaped from the minimum security prison at Florence on July 20. Davidson was just two months into a 21-month federal sentence for his role in sending millions of e-mails promoting questionable penny stocks. The Rocky Mountain News reported that Davidson forced his wife to help him escape from the minimum security facility.

The newspaper also reported that the teenager who was wounded was Davidson’s daughter, who escaped the murder scene and was lucid enough to tell authorities what had happened.

“What a nightmare, and such a coward. Davidson imposed the death penalty on family members for his own crime,” U.S. Attorney Troy Eid told the newspaper.

Davidson was sentenced on April 28. In addition to his nearly two-year prison sentence, Davidson was ordered to pay $714,139 in restitution to the IRS. As part of the restitution, Davidson had agreed to forfeit property he purchased, including gold coins, with the ill-gotten proceeds of his offense.

According to government documents, Davidson conducted his spamming operation from July 2002 through April 2007. The primary nature of Davidson’s business consisted of providing promotional services for companies by sending large volumes of unsolicited commercial e-mail.

Davidson’s original spamming activities were provided on behalf of companies to promote watches, perfume and other items. Beginning in the middle of 2005, Davidson sent spam on behalf of an unidentified Texas company to promote the sale of the company’s stock. The company generated its income through selling stock on behalf of small companies on the public market.

Davidson, aided by several subcontractors, sent hundreds of thousands of unsolicited e-mail messages to potential purchasers throughout the United States and the world touting the excellent investment opportunities the stock offered.

The e-mail messages contained false header information, which concealed the actual sender from the recipient of the e-mail. Davidson operated his spamming activities from his personal residence in Bennett, where he had a large network of computers and servers that facilitated his business.

And sometimes the news is good…

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A Brooklyn man was sentenced to 30 months in prison on Tuesday for sending spam e-mails to more than 1.2 million subscribers of America Online in a scheme that foiled the Internet company’s spam-filtering system.

Adam Vitale, 27, was sentenced in federal court in Manhattan after pleading guilty more than a year ago to breaking anti-spam laws. He was also ordered to pay $180,000 to AOL in restitution.

Vitale was caught making a deal with a government informant to send junk e-mails — known as spam — that advertised a computer security program in return for 50 percent of the product’s profits, prosecutors said.

“Spamming is serious criminal conduct; this is not a teenager engaging in child’s play,” U.S. District Judge Denny Chin told Vitale as he sentenced him. Vitale earlier apologized and said he had learned a lesson.

Prosecutors said Vitale had 22 prior convictions and had also helped run an online prostitution ring on the Web site www.craigslist.com, but he has not been criminally charged.

In the spam e-mail case, Vitale and another man, Todd Moeller, defeated AOL’s filter system by using several different computer servers to relay the e-mails and changed the e-mail header information to ensure the spam e-mails could not be traced back to them.

Moeller, of New Jersey, was sentenced last November to 27 months for his role in the scheme.

Court papers said that in less than a week in August 2005, Vitale and Moeller sent e-mails on behalf of the informant to more than 1,277,000 addresses of subscribers at AOL, the online division of Time Warner Inc.

Cory over at BoingBoing talks about another spammer bent on ruining Craigslist by bypassing the phone verification system. Cory refers to an article on Blackhatworld.

My feeling is that the only way to turn the tide is to aggressively turn the tables on spammers and make it very physically unpleasant for them.