Just three months after it helped put one of the nation's more notorious spammers all but out of business, EarthLink is going after what it calls a pair of "spam rings" operated from Alabama and British Columbia.
The Internet service provider said August 27 the two "rings," involving as many as 100 individuals, flooded their network with about 250 million spam messages, according to Reuters. Earthlink sued in federal court to compel a number of telephone companies, Web domain sellers, and others to provide information related to the two alleged rings, which EarthLink said cost them about $5 million in manpower and bandwidth waste, according to Reuters.
In early May, EarthLink won a $16.4 million award against the "Buffalo Spammer," Howard Carmack, who was arrested officially a week later and charged with identity theft, in a scheme involving Carmack's using fake Internet accounts to send out over 825 million spam messages since March 2002.
The rings EarthLink say are involved in the current action are said to hide behind a number of fake Websites and e-mail accounts bought with stolen credit-card numbers, including one group who pushed herbal Viagra, dating services, and do-it-yourself spam kits from numerous dialup EarthLink accounts around Birmingham, Alabama, Reuters said. This group paid their bills with the stolen credit accounts and bank account numbers while building themselves a shield of fake names, addresses, and companies, the wire service added.
The British Columbia group is accused of doing likewise, using stolen credit numbers to make fake EarthLink accounts and then trick Internet users into giving up their credit numbers, passwords, and other personal information by posing as an ISP which lost account information, Reuters said.
