Project Honey Pot, a service of Utah-based company Unspam Technologies LLC—which provides users with free anti-spam software—brought forth in U.S. district court a lawsuit representing 20,000 people seeking the identity of individuals who harvest millions of email addresses for spammers.
The lead attorney for the plaintiffs, Jon Praed, is part of the Arlington, Va.-based Internet Law Group. Praed previously—and successfully—represented America Online and Verizon Online in cases against junk emailers, and he said the purpose of the lawsuit is to follow the trail from the people doing the harvesting of email addresses to the actual spammers.
As opposed to suing spammers directly, the plaintiffs chose to sue individuals responsible for harvesting emails. These typically are not the same parties: Harvesters compile a list of email addresses then sell them to spam operators. "We’ve found that the Internet addresses of those doing the harvesting is a much smaller universe [than] those who are actually sending the messages," said Matthew Prince, chief executive office of Unspam. "[Locating the harvesters] may give us good indicators of who out there is at the top of these spam operations."
The plaintiffs filed in the Virginia court because the venue previously proved favorable for plaintiffs in anti-spam cases brought by some the world’s largest Internet service providers. The current Unspam-related case is different, as it is believed to be the first anti-spam case brought by a class of Internet users not affiliated with any single Internet service provider.
The present cases at bar have been filed under a Virginia anti-spam statute, as well as a federal 2003 anti-spam law. The statute penalizes fraudulent senders of unsolicited bulk email at $1 per message or $25,000 per day during which any offending messages were transmitted. The federal law, known by its acronym "CAN-SPAM," authorizes fines of $100 for every attempted transmission of spam containing false or misleading information. Damages increase threefold if a victim’s email address is harvested from a public website.
