First Spammer Convicted Under CAN-SPAM Law 226
eldavojohn writes "Spammer Jeffrey Brett Goodin has been convicted under the 2003 CAN-SPAM Act, the first person in the U.S. prosecuted successfully under the law. He is facing a sentence of up to 101 years in a federal prison after being found guilty of numerous illegal acts. According to prosecutors, Goodin was convicted on multiple counts in addition to the CAN-SPAM conviction, including wire fraud, unauthorized use of credit cards, misuse of the AOL trademark and attempted witness harassment. From the article: 'The law forbids e-mail marketers from sending false or misleading messages and requires them to provide recipients with a way to opt out of receiving future mailings. During trial, prosecutors presented evidence that Goodin used several compromised Internet accounts to send e-mails to America Online users. The e-mails appeared to be from the company's billing department and told customers to update their billing information or lose service.'"
Over the top (Score:5, Insightful)
Rapists and murderers get less.
I don't like spam but ffs that is so harsh.
Re:Over the top (Score:4, Insightful)
Rapists and murderers usually rape and murder less people. This douchebag probably targeted millions of people.
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Re:Over the top (Score:4, Insightful)
You are confusing several important things here:
1. This has nothing to do w/the death penalty.
2. He hasn't been sentenced yet. That happens on 6/11. Just because he's been convicted doesn't mean his sentence will be anything close to 101 years.
3. Fraud isn't just "annoying".
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2. My problem was with your reasoning, not the facts of the case.
3. That's true, but it's not murder either. I'd require both huge damages and huge numbers of people defrauded in order to sentence someone comparable to a murder conviction, if I were in the position to write the law. My problem was with the reasoning that defrauding lots of people for small amounts is comparable to murder, if the number of people involved is high enough. It's quite a complex issue I'd think, but
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Really. Every time a misleading or fraudulent e-mail was sent, that's one crime. Now, say you do a crime that's worth one year in jail. Do that a hundred and one times, that's a hundred and one years, seperately.
Don't think of it as one fraud being given a century; consider it as one fraud, one year. Once you're done with that one - hey, you gotta pay for this one, too, and so on, and so forth.
Murder and rape - you get bitch-motherfucking-slapped just for that a
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So maybe he'll be sentenced to 101 concurrent 1 year sentences totalling 1 year in jail all together.
IMO, his crimers are not akin to murder which warrants a life sentence in many states ( at least the ones that lack the death penatly ).
Re:Over the top (Score:4, Insightful)
And when a diabetic dies becuase he wasn't able to get his insulin as a result of this asshole cleaning out his account? Somebody has to walk a rough neighborhood because slappy mc'spammer here had a great idea on how to afford a big screen TV? When someone can't deal with being rejected from another job because his credit report is a mess and decides to end it?
Fraud can have serious real world impact, the fall out from identity theft and stolen money can be devestating to those living on the edge, the majority of Americans. Personally, I have more sympathy for the guy who lost his temper and did something stupid than for the guy who thought destroying people's lives was a great way to make some extra cash.
1 second per spam sent, plus per victim? (Score:4, Interesting)
But think about the number of people this spammer succeeded in ripping off - was it 100, or 1000, or 10000? Usually you'd spent less time in jail for stealing $1M from one person than $100 each from 10,000 people, or $1000 each from 1000 people, but at six months in jail per petty theft or 1 year per grand theft, he could easily be doing a lot of time.
Remember that this guy's a phishing thief, not just a pills-or-porn seller. How much time does he deserve for theft? If an average worker makes $50K/year, and the spammer makes $500K ripping off N victims, that's 100 person-years of honest labor he'd need to do just to pay them back for the value of their lost work time, not even counting the lost value by not having their money when they needed it. Should he only have to give back 1x what he stole, or pay more than that as compensation?
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We should all go visit him. (Score:2)
times to visit him. Spam him with pissed off internet
users for however much of that 101 years he serves!
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42
duh
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My life or yours?
Re:Over the top (Score:5, Informative)
That's a lot more than just sending annoying emails. Basically, the guy is a crook. Why do you have a problem with him going to jail? People do time for things other than violent crime, you know.
Re:Over the top (Score:4, Interesting)
If you are in the process of commiting a crime (in this case intrawebs fraud), and know you will face 100 years in prison for getting caught, what's to stop you from killing anyone who gets in your way? Any other sentences would be inconsiquential. Hell, you might as well try and take down the police who attempt to bring you in. If you manage to get a few, it'd sorta be like a bonus.
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Well, the only thing that I can think of is that then you'd be in the class of cop-killers, one of the groups along with pedophiles, snitches, and cops themselves whose lives are extra-special not-fun in prison.
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Yeah, you're right, they're different than the others... it's inmates making your lives hell vs the guards making your lives hell (or getting inmates to), it's just that either way life is less fun than it would be otherwise and that's all i was going for.
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Deterrance is a myth easily disproved by none other than the department of justice: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/corrtyp.htm [usdoj.gov]
Between 1980 and 2000 the number of people in state prison for violent crimes went from 200,000 to 600,000 -- a 150% increase. I can tell you with certainly the US population has not increased that much over the same period of time, so we can ass
Re:Over the top (Score:4, Interesting)
Deterrence is a concept that relies on Party B being afraid of something Party A can do to it, and that whatever Party A can do is worse than the risk of committing the act. If Party B is already subject to Party C however, and the things that Party C can do to Party B are inherently worse than anything Party A can do... and/or if Party B is not fully aware of the consequences of his actions under Party A's rule (see cases of teenagers illegally smuggling drugs into countries with an insta-death penalty)... then deterrence is not nearly a factor.
For deterrence to stop me from doing something, I have to:
A) Be aware of the punishment
B) Be afraid of the punishment more than the status quo
C) Be marginally intelligent enough to understand the consequences and have no mental defects that affect your empathy
Deterrence in and of itself works. Otherwise you would eat poop and poisonous substances, you would go in the cookie jar every day, and you would kill people because they got in your way. Deterrence is a biological phenomenon (eating something that is either inherently noxious or made you sick), a reactionary phenomenon (see Pavlov's Dog experiments / rat experiments designed to teach with negative feedback), an a social phenomenon (if I injure this person, society will extract it's punishment from me).
Deterrence doesn't work in this case because it's better for a 'Mexican national' (lol... PC phrase) to escape the shithole known as Mexico, take his chances here in the US, AND GO TO PRISON than it is to stay in Mexico. Yep, you read it right! Our prisons are more attractive than living in Mexico in certain cases.
How the hell is deterrence going to stop that?!?
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hmmmm
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If you're a criminal, you likely put your own needs above others. If it's okay to steal from people (he committed fraud) to make your life better, why not to kill someone trying to imprison you? And if they bring him in by force, he'll still get satisfaction at knowing he hurt the people who are not hurting him (in prison).
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Even a a "bad guy" says to himself that killing's wrong, but does it anyway, there has to be a secondary reason that excuses the action and makes him thing he's entitled to do it.
Re:Over the top (Score:5, Funny)
He's being charged with improving their reputation and brand name. Bastard.
Re:Over the top (Score:5, Informative)
In other words, while he could theoretically get 100 years, in reality he's going to probably get 1-2 years tops.
minimum-security resort (Score:2)
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Re:Over the top (Score:5, Funny)
Another off-the-cuff reaction: When the mafia lands in court, the witnesses get whacked. How appropriate is it that a spammer can't accomplish any more than witness harassment? I can only imagine his method: Emails stating "Y t3st1fy? Do and no more v14gr4 for U!"
Re:Over the top (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah but even for that, 100 years is a pretty stiff sentence
Re:Over the top (Score:5, Funny)
100 years is probably excessive -- one night might be sufficient...
Inmate: What'cha in for, buddy?
Spammer: I... uh... sent people spam emails... about... male enhancement...
Inmate: That so?!? Hey fellas! Meet my new b*tch... [grinning]
Spammer: GUARD!!!!!!!!
Re:Over the top (Score:4, Funny)
where they put you if you may not be moral enough to join the army after
committing your special crime, and there was all kinds of mean nasty ugly
looking people on the bench there. Mother rapers. Father stabbers. Father
rapers! Father rapers sitting right there on the bench next to me! And
they was mean and nasty and ugly and horrible crime-type guys sitting on the
bench next to me. And the meanest, ugliest, nastiest one, the meanest
father raper of them all, was coming over to me and he was mean 'n' ugly
'n' nasty 'n' horrible and all kind of things and he sat down next to me
and said, "Kid, whad'ya get?" I said, "I didn't get nothing, I had to pay
$50 and pick up the garbage." He said, "What were you arrested for, kid?"
And I said, "Littering." And they all moved away from me on the bench
there, and the hairy eyeball and all kinds of mean nasty things, till I
said, "And creating a nuisance." And they all came back, shook my hand,
and we had a great time on the bench, talkin about crime, mother stabbing,
father raping, all kinds of groovy things that we was talking about on the
bench. And everything was fine, we was smoking cigarettes and all kinds of
things, until the Sargeant came over..........
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"You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant [wikipedia.org]."
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In Soviet Prison, bubba tosses your salad?
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That's a theoretical maximum of getting consecutive sentences of for numerous counts... if he attempted to defraud hundreds of people, it is simply possible that he could get hundreds of years. Unfortunately, these sorts of sentences are rarely handed out for the people who really deserve it -- and I mean the spammers, not the murderers. He'll probably be able to serve many of the sentences concurrently, or he'll make some sort of deal to drop the l
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If this is relating to computer fraud how the fuck can they justify over 100 years of punishment?
Rapists and murderers get less.
Maybe the problem isn't that this spammer's sentence is too harsh, maybe the problem is the sentences handed down to rapists and murderers are are too lenient.
I don't have a problem with the Enron fraudsters spending the rest of their days behind bars, and the magnitude of fraud that this scumbag is guilty of, is on a similar scale.
I also hope it's hard-core poundin-in-the-ass prison they send him to, and not some freakin club-fed country club.
Read the article (Score:2)
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Consider the total social cost of this dirtbag's activities...
A billion spam emails * 1000 bytes each * ~15 hops each = ~15 TB of traffic
A billion spam emails * ~33% acceptance by POP3 servers * 1000 bytes each * ~2 weeks stored on disk = ~5 TB-days of disk storage
A billion spam emails * ~33% acceptance by POP3 servers * 10% penetration of spam filters * 5 seconds for the user
Don't believe everything you read... (Score:2)
If this is relating to computer fraud how the fuck can they justify over 100 years of punishment?
See, the key phrase in this article is "up to". The journalist or prosecutor arrived at the figure 101 years simply from multiplying the number of crimes he's convicted of by the maximum sentence for each act.
Simply put, there's no way he'll serve anywhere close to that long. Even if by some insane judge sentences him to 101 years in jail, that's a no-brainer that'll get reduced on first appeal.
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And even if he doesn't, ya just know he's not gonna server the whole 101 years.
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If you break it down to the number of victims, he's probably getting on the order of minutes per victim. A murderer gets years per victim. I think the ratio is fine there.
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If you break it down to the number of victims, he's probably getting on the order of minutes per victim. A murderer gets years per victim. I think the ratio is fine there.
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For corporate crooks, they need to start making the punishment fit the crime. If you steal 200 million dollars from your employees retirement before the company goes belly-up, and you get caught: you should be expected to repay that money, PLUS do jail time.
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It's all just a joke of course until you become the victim of one of these assholes. Then you find yourself online advocating that they be nailed to a wooden cross next to I-10. Hate doesn't even come close to how I feel about these people.
If I could ever lay my hands on the guy who stole my identity and spent a couple of weeks writing hot checks across Mississipp
Forgivness (Score:2)
Until you forgive, you are letting the people who wronged you continue to have power over your life. Forgivness: It's not for them, it's for you.
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Rapists and murderers get less"
I'd phrase that as "how the fuck can we justify rapists and murders so much less time in prison, when this guy can get over 100 years".
How quickly someone can get out of prison for destroying a life is where the miscarriage of justice lies.
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I would say the law isn't harsh enough against people who commit aggrevated sexual assault and other highly violent crimes. Murder is a rubbery area depending on the motive as people are often driven to extremes by other people.
Spammers have just about destroyed the usefulness of e-mail. E-mail could have been more of a revolution for human society than what it has become. You could look at this on a global scale as in what it the total amount of negativity that this this person has inflicted on the world
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First of all, that's "up to 101 years". The perp is still scheduled for his sentencing. The actual sentence may be substantially less than that.
The perp used a phishing scheme, so he didn't merely annoy people with ads for V1@gr@ but stole credit cards and robbed people.
Finally, phishers and spammers take hours out of the lives of millions of people, and cost them many millions of dollars, so this is a theft of major proportions. The fact that the perp only got to spend a tiny fraction of that himse
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"In addition to the anti-spam conviction, Goodin was convicted of 10 other counts, including wire fraud, misuse of the AOL trademark and attempted witness harassment."
Those, especially witness intimidation, are probably the big ticket items.
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Great point! Judges hate it when the accused is convicted of attempted witness harassment. They tend to take a very dim view of folks who attempt to suborn justice. That is only their privilege!
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I don't think his nuts could drag him very far, they lack independant power of movement.
Durr (Score:5, Insightful)
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It would be like if I were to break into someone's house, shoot them, get arrested and the papers were to read "Lord_Slepnir gets Lethal Injection for violating recently passed handgun bill!"
RTFA (Score:2)
He hasn't gotten any years at all yet, he is due to be sentenced (per TFA) on June 11.
Since, almost certainly, the sentences will run mostly concurrently, it won't really be accurate to say that "most of the years he got" were for one thing or another, since they'll all be the same years.
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I like your style, sir. Quite the clever pun considering the institution he will be visiting shortly. Question is, does a rusty trombone count as being in the middle?
Not really a CAN-SPAM victory (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not really a CAN-SPAM victory (Score:5, Insightful)
At least, it used to be the case that there were people whose sole crime was sending out absurd amounts of clearly unwanted email. ("Clearly unwanted" in the sense that they deliberately provided false information in headers and refused to honor opt-out requests. Providing false information in headers was not in and of itself fraudulent.)
These days, given how much spam goes through bot-nets, there may not be any spammers left who are not guilty of crimes other than sending spam. But it may also be the case that it's hard to convict them on, say, hacking charges, but you could get them on the spam charges.
And conversely, if the appeals court throws out the CAN-SPAM convictions, even if it keeps the other convictions, we'll know that we have to either rewrite the law or depend on the existing fraud laws.
Will it Make a Difference? (Score:4, Interesting)
Given the creeps anywhere can run these scams outside of N. America, it just means other methods might work better.
We can start by having ISPs who know computers crunching out a 1000 emails at a time in the middle of the night get dumped off the Internet until the user gets a new hard drive or computer.
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Simple, just monitor port 25 activity. It's probably pretty lightweight to track only SMTP connections to outside servers (heck, many networks ban them) since most connections are to the ISP's own servers. Then just count recipients, and if it passes a truly outrageous threshold, call the customer to inform them. If it continues at high volume for a day or two,
no tax evasion? (Score:5, Interesting)
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2006 tax returns are not due unitl April 15th. He hasn't turned in a fraudulant return for his 2006 taxes yet. Can't prosecute for a fraud that has not happened.
What about foreign based spammers? (Score:4, Insightful)
I would hope that other governments could make similar examples of spammers based from their countries.
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the foreign based spammers often collect money on behalf of US-based companies.
just read the articles out there about how many of the spammers's clients can be traced - what good is a mortgage in, say, Korea, to someone in the USA?
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just read the articles out there about how many of the spammers's clients can be traced"
Great point. I didn't even think of that. Maybe we should be going after the spammers's clients too.
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I don't think that dumping all serious predators on desert island would be a bad idea ei
Confused congress (Score:2)
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See I was thinking it should be renamed "CAN'T SPAM"... is kinda misleading to anyone who read it like I did...
I don't know if that's quite enough (Score:2)
CAN-SPAM (Score:5, Interesting)
First of all, what we really want to avoid is any law that inhibits our right to freedom of speech. It's very easy to write a definition of spam that is overly broad, and applies to legitimate messages as well. Let's assume for the moment that this would be a bad thing. I haven't heard any complaints that CAN-SPAM is flawed in this way.
The complaints are that CAN-SPAM doesn't go far enough. Spammers could simply change their spam to comply with the provisions of the law, and suddenly their unwanted junk is no longer technically "spam" in the eyes of the law. In theory, this may be true, but in practice, it's not happening. The law has been in effect for three years now, and spammers still aren't even bothering to pretend to comply with the law, they're just continuing to blatantly disregard it. This means that just about all the spam I get in my inbox (plus all the spam that I would have gotten in my inbox if I didn't have a whole pile of filters in place to block it) is clearly defined as illegal according to CAN-SPAM.
So why am I still getting all this spam? It's not because CAN-SPAM is a bad law. It's not because the spammers have found a loophole, or have changed their spam so it complies with the law. The problem is enforcement: the FTC and FBI don't have the resources to go after these guys. It's been three years, and they've only gotten one conviction.
Yes, some spammers are based outside the US, and while CAN-SPAM may still apply to them because they're sending spam to Americans, they're outside the jurisdiction of our law enforcement agencies. Several other countries have pledged their support in the International War On Spam(TM), but again, somebody has to actually track down the spammers so they can be arrested, and that's what's not happening.
So what's the solution? It's not to pass more laws making spam more illegal than it already is. The solution is for Congress to earmark funding for spam investigation and prosecution. They won't think of it themselves, so somebody has to tell them to do it. So, write to your Senators and Representatives, and tell them you want to see better enforcement!
Now, who's got that list of checkboxes?
Amazing (Score:2)
One conviction. Good Job!
First conviction for 3 year old law? (Score:2)
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Think about it, how many bi
Lose AOL service? Dont make me laugh. (Score:2)
so four years on, CAN-SPAM is still useless (Score:2)
Eighth Amendment (Score:2)
101 years? Is this a joke? How is this not cruel and unusual? Some might argue it less cruel to shoot him.
This is disgusting.
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Re:That is so fair. (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not saying it's fair or anything, just that's the way it is. Perhaps there should be a mandatory maximum sentence--though that raises a whole other set of problems.
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Re:That is so fair. (Score:4, Funny)
Or figured out what the 'RT' stands for
Re:Thank you (Score:5, Funny)
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You couldn't possibly be biased, though, Mr. "Isagenix."
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OK, so you didn't read the article. Can't you at least read the summary? Spamming, yes... and dealing with stolen bank account info, fraudulently misrepresenting himself as another company, and witness intimidation, etc. This is someone who's a lot farther along than just some spam monkey, and his actions involved untold thousands of people. So you shouldn't be talki
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I never said this guy should get less time, though I do believe 101 years is a bit extreme. I don't think he should be up for parole any sooner than 50 years, however.
I would love to see there be a mandatory order of magnitude on sentences for child molesters, so that if you have been molesting for 5 years, the minimum sentence and soonest you could see parole would be 50 years (5 * 10).
We don'
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Not to mention parents who are charged with child abuse for spanking or people charged for computer images they may have not known about. I'm already afraid of the "think of the children
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You're comparing the sum of all the maximum sentences for a bunch of offenses, on the one hand, to the actual sentence imposed, on the other. The maximum sentence for sexually abusing a young child even once in most states is something like 10-20 years; so even assuming it occurred only twice a year for six years, the maximum sentence
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One guy will get thrown under the bus and made an example of for a stupid offense, and the next will get a slap on the wrist for a very serious crime (multiple murders, rapes, molestation, kidnapping, etc).
Take for instance the 2 border security guards, sentenced to 11 and 12 years respectively, IIRC, for failing to file the proper paperwork. Compare that
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The news is selectively presented, by design, to highlight the shocking, unexpected, noteworthy, and unusual. It naturally greatly exaggerates the relative significance of inconsistencies and abnormalities; it also generally provides very little of the context that would explain why those unusual or shocking results occur.
Re:Don't Spam, Molest Kids Instead (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, that makes all sorts of sense.
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I believe that the age of consent for marriage (especially with parental consent) in many states is lower than the age of consent for sex with someone other than a spouse.
IIRC, the former is 12, or lower, in some states.
So it may be abstractly possible in extreme circumstances.