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Spammers Hit With Billion Dollar Lawsuit
David Utter
Staff Writer
2007-04-27
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Unspam Technologies' Project Honey Pot filed a federal lawsuit against spammers as part of their efforts to root out email and comment spam.
 | | Spammers Hit With Billion Dollar Lawsuit |  |
Project Honey Pot brought the largest ever anti-spam lawsuit into action with their filing in Virginia. The ten-page complaint cited violations of the federal CAN-SPAM act by defendants unknown, beginning with the start of the Project's tracking in January 2005:
To date, Project Honey Pot has identified 2,489,814 unique spam server IP addresses, 15,570 unique harvester IP addresses, 87,643 unique dictionary attack spam server IP addresses, and since April 2007, has identified 630 comment spam server IP addresses
Members who have joined the Project donated MX records and installed 'honey pot' pages on their systems to help gather this data. Unspam said in a blog post it has members in over 100 countries.
Internet Law Group founding partner Jon Praed is representing the Project in their court action. Praed has been involved in several court cases related to spam, and represented Verizon against convicted fraudster Alan Ralsky.
Unspam said its lawsuit is unique in that it is a response to the practice of harvesting email addresses. Under federal CAN-SPAM legislation, Unspam said a 'penalty enhancement' exists for this behavior, but in most cases evidence of harvesting could not be presented.
Project Honey Pot claims to be able to demonstrate this harvesting has taken place, through the data contributed by their members. Establishing the harvesting took place looks like it was the easy part. With people like Ralsky and other spammers operating outside the United States, the Project could be hard-pressed to collect on their action.
It does not seem very likely accused spammers are going to willingly show up in a federal courthouse and face allegations. We think Unspam is on track to receive a favorable judgment from the bench because of this, but unless actual damages can be collected the lawsuit may be little more than a symbolic gesture.
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Project Honey Pot, Lawsuit, Spammers
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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