Anti-spam activists often enough say that if you make it costly to spam, the spam will begin to erode. America Online may have been listening: the online giant has swung five federal lawsuits, their first in two years, seeking over $10 million in damages and gaining authority to subpoena Internet service providers and others to hunt down the targeted spammers.
Most of the defendants were listed as John Does in the filing, according to published reports, but some of the named defendants included Michael Levesque, of Issaquah, Washington; and, George A. Moore, Jr., or Linthicum Maryland - whose telephone numbers were unlisted and whose domain name registrations had false phone numbers, according to the Associated Press.
But while AOL was hitting some spammers with litigation, two major AOL Time Warner shareholders - the University of California and Amalgamated Bank of New York - were hitting AOL with likewise: they sued AOL April 14, accusing AOL of using "tricks and misstatements" to inflate AOL stock values, according to E-Commerce Times.
The university and the bank accuse AOL of misstating earnings by almost $1 billion before AOL merged with Time Warner in January 2001, E-Commerce Times said. The suit also charges top executives of both companies pocketed over $930 million from "improper" stock sales after the deal was done. The university claims over $450 million in losses after its Time Warner stock took a dive, while Amalgamated claimed $56 million in losses.
