In a joint press conference yesterday, the companies all characterized the defendants as the biggest and most prolific spam operations. AOL deputy general counsel Randy Bowe said: These six lawsuits target some of the most notorious outlaw spammers on the internet.
The ISPs are taking on one or two cases each. Half of the lawsuits name John Does, the other half name individuals and companies the ISPs have managed to track down. Arguably only one of the defendants could be described as notorious.
One of AOL’s two suits targets Davis Wolfgang Hawke, who was outed as a former white supremacist neo-Nazi (born Andrew Britt Greenbaum) and a former head of the American National Party, in a Salon.com article last summer.
We know what we’re doing. We’re only a couple of subpoenas away from standing at someone’s door and handing them a summons, said Les Seagraves, assistant general counsel of EarthLink, when asked about the identities of the John Does.
The suits are filed using state laws as well as CAN-SPAM, which outlaws practices such as address farming and header spoofing, and mandates spammers include working opt-out links and a physical mailing address in every spam.
Collectively, the six lawsuits target people the ISPs allege are responsible for sending hundreds of millions of CAN-SPAM-violating messages every month. Yahoo’s suit targets people it calls the Head Operation, due to the alleged ringleader being called Eric Head.
Yahoo general counsel Mike Callaghan said: The Head Operation represents by far the greatest single source of disruptive illegal spam that’s hitting Yahoo network. They’re sending nearly 100 million spam messages a month, and that’s just on the Yahoo network.
The companies said they will sue not only the spammers sending the email, but the people paying them to do it, although none were named in yesterday’s press conference. This, potentially, means some well-known brands could emerge as defendants in future.
EarthLink is definitely taking an interest in the people not only filling your inbox with spam, but the people that are benefiting from it and the people asking them to do it, said Seagraves. We going to go all way up chain until get this business is stopped.
The companies also said that these lawsuits are not the last that they will file, which is probably a good thing, given that even if this round of suits takes a billion spams a month out of inboxes, that’s still a fraction of a percent of the global problem.
Anti-spam vendor Brightmail Inc says that 62% of the world’s 455 billion monthly emails is spam. So there are 280 billion spams sent every month, and taking a few hundred million out of the picture is barely scratching the surface.
The suits were filed a few days after Hypertouch Inc, a small California ISP, became the first in the industry to sue a suspected spammer using the CAN-SPAM Act.
This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire
